Published in Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America, edited by Rodolfo Stavenhagen, 1970.
Counterreform
Ernest Feder
Ernest Feder is an agricultural economist with long experience in the Americas, and is the author of many articles on land reform problems. He wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the help and suggestions of many experts in academia and in national or international organizations. This is an original contribution to this volume, and the opinions expressed therein are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions with which he is or has been associated. The article was written before much of the recent land reform in Peru (June 1969) was put into effect and does not, therefore, take these changes into consideration in the discussion of this country.
Before entering into the substance of the history-making, continent-wide anti-land-reform movement of the 1960's which quietly agitated the Latin American nations and stopped all land reforms there, we must make a comment on the concept "Counterreform." In this generation, land reform appeared to begin in earnest in the late 1950's with the Cuban revolution. Its prompt repercussion in all countries was a series of land reform laws, the organization of national land reform institutes and the execution or at least planning of projects to give land to farm people who did not have any or who had insufficient amounts of land. But while land reform is designed to make fundamental changes in the structure of Latin American agricultures, Counterreform is not a reform movement, and the term is therefore a misnomer. On the contrary -- with the qualification noted below -- the term denotes principally the bundle of policies, practices, traditions or trends which individually or in the aggregate are designed, or happen to, undo whatever land reforms have taken place [174] or to make it impossible, by design or otherwise, that a land reform can be carried out. The goal of land reform is to change the existing power structure in agriculture and in the allied sectors and to replace it with a different structure able to form the basis for a dynamic growth of food and fiber output and a substantial improvement in the welfare of the peasant. It is therefore at the same time destructive (of the old regime) and constructive (of the new agrarian sector). Counterreform wants above all to maintain the status quo. It is neither destructive nor constructive. But by maintaining the foundations of traditional agricultures with their shortcomings and the obstacles they put in the way of a betterment of the conditions of the rural population, of low productivity or of lack of diversification, it is, in historical perspective, merely negative. Land reform is a strategy to help the millions of poor peasants on the continent. Counterreform maneuvers to maintain the power and position of the landed elite, and with it the entire fabric of Latin American society.But an important qualification is to be made here which shows the complexity of the whole issue. There are times when Counterreform is more than a mere defense mechanism on the part of the power elite threatened in the unlimited exercise of all its privileges to which it believes itself to be entitled. Or the elite may engage in attempts to change the structure of agriculture in its own image, even using land reform as a stepping stone and turning it into Counterreform.1 In such a case, where defense turns into aggression, the elite may strive to strengthen its control over land and labor and to increase the inequality in the distribution of income and capital resources. If the land reform process was not complete but only partial, it could simply bypass it or corrupt it for its own purpose. But although this may result in modifying the agrarian structure to suit the aims of those who control the land, it can be called a reform only by stretching the imagination. [175]
Land reform and its counterpart, the Counterreform, are not limited to the agricultural sector. In agrarian societies like those of the Latin American continent -- including even those with a modest degree of industrialization -- the agricultural sector obviously sets the pace, and largely determines the shape of economic and political activities, although it might often appear to be otherwise. The major reason is that it is the output of agriculture around which an important portion of the commercial, banking, industrial and service sector has to spin its domestic and international actions. What is more: the principle of specialization, so typical of modern industrial societies, does not apply to Latin American nations, least of all in the upper sphere of society. What is characteristic is, on the contrary, the close interrelation between the various economic sectors at the top levels through individuals, or families, fulfilling simultaneously several functions as rural landlords, bankers, dealers, exporters, importers, retailers, politicians or lawyers. A good portion of the economic and political activities is therefore carried out by a small group of individuals or families having their roots first in agriculture and then in any or all of the other sectors. Obviously then land reform and Counterreform are not only an agricultural matter, but they affect society as a whole.
Counterreform is also an elusive matter. Land reform in Latin America has become a formalized program of national governments. It has its statutes, its agencies, its implementing personnel, its achievements which can be partly measured in terms of (say) number of projects executed and farm families settled on the land. Or if it fails to settle farm families, it can be criticized, and blame can be fixed. Its supporters and beneficiaries are known and easily identified. Counterreform is practically never formal. It is a policy, but not a program. It has its agents, but no agencies. It is diffused, usually anonymous and often unrecognized as such. For that reason it is difficult to pin down and to evaluate in all its ramifications. The tools of those who fight for a change in the existing social order simply are different from those of its defenders. The latter can even proclaim themselves to be in favor of "land [176] reform" and fool quite a few because their concept of land reform is different from that of true land reformers.2 To separate these sheep-in-wolves'-clothing from the real wolves (the land reform mongers) is at times a bewildering task.
HOW TO MAKE COUNTERREFORM WITH LAND REFORM LEGISLATION It is no secret that the land reform movement of the sixties which began, as we said earlier, with the Cuban revolution and was brought in 1961 under the protective wings of the Alliance for Progress through the Charter of Punta del Este -- signed by all the nations of the American hemisphere except Cuba -- is entirely stalled. Perhaps the best way to begin a systematic description of the reasons why in the short period of four or six years practically nothing has been achieved to bring about "the effective transformation of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use with a view to replacing latifundia and dwarf holdings by an equitable system of land tenure" (to use the now dead phraseology of Objective 6 of Title I of the Charter) is to look first at the measures which the various Latin nations took to bring about land reform.
An initial step has always been for parliaments to pass land reform laws. These laws are the most important reform measures. They are the foundation of the land reform process, determine its scope and delimit its progress. A new law must redefine the relations of the peasants to the land and to its products, the relations among farm people themselves, and those between farm people and their government. A reform law can be a relatively simple matter. It can be short and concise. Depending on the new land tenure system which will do away with the old "unjust structure and system" -- new private holdings of more equal size, enterprises held cooperatively or communally by the peasants, collectives or state [17l] farms -- the law can by one stroke do away with all privately owned farms in excess of a certain size (say thirty or forty acres of good land, or more if the land is of poorer quality) provide for the establishment of a new system or systems of landholdings; regulate the organization of peasants and farm workers and define the functions of government in controlling or supervising the production and marketing of the products as well as in organizing the peasants. Such provisions, clearly worded, contained in a few articles, could become the foundation of the new agrarian structure. If its execution were left to a government agency with full authority, such a law would prove to be an efficient tool to bring about a massive reform.
This is not what Latin American parliaments have done.3 Their laws have been a playground for lawyers and politicians of the most diverse political tendencies and abilities. The goals of reform have been obscured and the laws have been endowed with many objectives, in the wake of innumerable political compromises, so that they have become inconsistent. The legislation has been burdened with innumerable and lengthy provisions and exceptions, often couched in legal phraseology susceptible to numerous interpretations. It deals with the land tenure problem (as it should) as well as with totally extraneous matters. It introduces in the land reform processes prerequisites which are time-consuming and provide for long delays in the execution. There has been a conscious effort made to regulate each and every aspect of the reform process so as to be certain that the agency in charge of reform is left with no elbow room for its implementation. This legislation is therefore extremely difficult to implement and does not lay the foundation for a massive or even in some cases a token land reform. It does not look for the "effective transformation" of the antiquated land tenure [178] system.4 Many land reform institutes have become aware of this fact after having attempted to carry out "land reform" unsuccessfully for several years. They have put the blame on the legislation and attempted to have it modified by the legislature. (This is an extremely risky venture under the conditions which now prevail in Latin America. Legislatures are now more likely still to impede reform than in 1962 or 1964.) We shall briefly explore later why all nations of the Alliance for Progress have reached this stage. In the next pages we shall give a more detailed description of a few typical features of the existing legislation. But first it must be pointed out that with the political conditions of the 1960's one could hardly have expected Latin American parliaments to come up with anything but the type of anti-land-reform land reform legislation to which reference has been made. This legislation is a true reflection of the existing economic and political power structure which has been described in earlier pages and which is fully mirrored in the parliaments. Another way of, saying the same thing is that one does not have to assume that the legislators purposely prepared legislation of less benefit to peasants than to estate owners, because this has been part and parcel of the established, generation-old tradition. When the Charter of Punta del Este spoke of the possibility of an effective transformation of unjust social land tenure structures and systems, it expressed only a pious hope, not a [179] politically feasible policy. To be sure, the developments of the beginning of the decade filled men in power with apprehension. The Cuban land reform had an electrifying effect on campesinos throughout the continent. It marked the beginning of peasant uprisings on the continent, some of which were of unprecedented proportions. (The full extent of these uprisings will not be known for some time to come. They were handled by the military in the manner of warfare and accompanied by news blackouts. It is reported that in Peru alone the revolt involved three hundred thousand Indians.) The truth is therefore that legislation on land reform was triggered by peasant unrest and revolts, or great fear of them.5 But none of this affected the basic power structure in and outside of parliament. Quite the contrary: once the revolts had been suppressed, the elite came out of these struggles with flying colors. It is not surprising then that the laws on land reform originated much in the same manner as most agricultural policies and programs in nations with latifundio agricultures: without seeking the cooperation of the carnpesinos or their organizations. (By this time most of the strong peasant and rural workers' organizations had already been destroyed.) The only difference -- an important one, of course -- was that the land reform legislation was claimed to be of direct benefit to the carnpesinos. But the peasantry is not represented in parliament. The politicians who pretend to speak for the campesinos, detached as they always are from campesino life, often do not know what is of benefit to the carnpesinos or have their own manner of interpreting it. Thus the benefit which is embodied in the legislation, is at best secondhand. On the other side, the large associations of big landowners are well represented in legislative circles, have access to the national press and other news media, are able to exert political pressure at all levels and in many sectors. Regardless of any differences they may have among each other with regard to other agricultural matters, they form a united front against the carnpesinos and only by coincidence do their suggestions reflect the interests of carnpesinos. They have played an important role in shaping the legislation. Some [180] crucial provisions which make land reform legislation what it is, can be traced directly to them.
Here then is the situation: Motivated principally by fear of peasant uprisings, many Latin American nations pass reform legislation after having repressed actual or impending revolts by military means. The landed elite comes out of the disturbances with their powers and privileges largely unmolested and in many cases strengthened. One price they have to pay for social peace is the passage of land reform laws and the promise of a land reform. But the legislation is passed by parliaments6 in which the landed elite has great ascendancy and the campesinos, remaining mere bystanders, practically none.
And now to the laws themselves. We mentioned their length, the inadequate legal techniques and the delays used. This deserves only a brief comment because the laws have other, more serious limitations. Let us take a not atypical example. Peru, which has a history of recent peasant revolts of considerable intensity, has adopted a law with nothing less than 250 articles (some of which are very long). In the official edition, it fills a little booklet of about eighty pages. Under one of its provisions, the reform institute is obligated to prepare implementing regulations for promulgation by the president before any land reform can take place. This simple rule has served to postpone some important reform procedures for years, and according to the latest information no land has as yet been distributed to the peasants since the inception of the law over four years ago. However, an avalanche of regulations was forthcoming (about 500 articles as a minimum) although many articles simply repeat the text of the land reform law itself and are therefore not regulatory.
Our sample law provides that land reform must take place in "priority areas" -- a requirement contained in laws of other nations as well. Priority areas are selected after study of land tenure conditions there, in order to justify their selection. (Obviously such a justification is hardly necessary because all of Latin America is one single priority area. In reality, priority [181] areas, i.e. areas where a reform is attempted, are always theaters of serious previous conflicts and the selection only serves to endow a purely political choice with an aura of objectivity and to postpone land reform.) Under the best of circumstances the land reform agency requires a minimum of several months to prepare a report for the Executive so that a given area can be declared a priority zone. However, the law does not give time limits regarding the preparation of the report nor regarding the decision of the Executive, nor does it enable the land reform agency (as it ought to) to declare a priority or better a land reform zone on its own. It is obvious that no expropriation of estates can begin until the Executive agrees with the agency and until a decree has been promulgated.
Time schedules or priorities are perhaps necessary for large countries with diverse agricultural conditions in view of the lack of technical personnel and of financial resources (although this argument has often been stretched well beyond its limits), but in truth the wording and intent of the provision to which reference is made is absurd from the point of view of a land reformer. In its report, the land reform agency must take into account such criteria as degree of land concentration, population pressure, feudal labor relations and others. This enumeration is a complicating element: what is important for land reform is the destruction of large private estates and to provide peasants with land. The enumeration of the factors is a clever device to exclude some important agricultural areas from reform. For example, an area of huge sugar or cotton plantations where there are no "feudal labor relations" but only "modern" wage employment at less than legal minimum wages and rural slum housing, could be eliminated. More important: a priority area could be ascertained only if the criteria were known for the entire country, as otherwise no priority can, in strict logic, be established. If the justification of the selection is taken seriously, the land reform agency could not be satisfied with available statistical or qualitative data which are in practically all countries outdated, inadequate and unrelated to the peasant problems. It would first have to undertake an appropriate census and field [182] research. (Brazil has practically done this. It has only given land to a little over three hundred peasants in four years after passing the legislation.)
An alternative with more promise for speed and concrete results would be for the agency to be authorized to proceed on its own power from area to area until the entire country has been reformed -- even using undisguised simple political criteria in order to set up time schedules. It will be apparent that for reasons explained later, and in view of historical experience, speed in carrying out land reform is of the essence. It minimizes the chances that estate owners can marshal enough strength to oppose it and wreck the reform, as has happened in so many cases. Compare this with the snail's pace with which reform must proceed in Peru. A careful calculation leads to the conclusion that the total time required by law before the agency can even begin to turn over estate land to the peasants (that is, not including the time required for the declaration of the area as priority zone nor the time needed for the actual land distribution and settlement itself) amounts to no less than thirteen months as a rock-bottom minimum, and it can be of unpredictable length if estate owners take advantage of the various legal maneuvers which the law authorizes, to postpone or set aside the expropriation of their estate which the law authorizes!
Our sample law, which is typical of land reform legislation in Latin America, contains another set of provisions which make a massive land reform extremely difficult even under the best of circumstances. It requires expropriation of estates on an individual basis, not of all estates in a given larger area or zone.7 In other words, the reform institute designates specific estates for expropriation and handles each estate and each owner individually. The estate owner is treated with kid gloves; he is notified formally of the institute's [183] decision and given a substantial lapse of time to formulate objections. This enables him to oppose this decision in ways which shall be described below. The piecemeal approach to land reform has naturally more advantages for estate owners than peasants. One of the more serious consequences is that even in a relatively small agricultural zone it does not result in an effective transformation of unjust structures and systems of land tenure. The expropriation of one or five estates in (say) a province or state makes almost no dent whatever in the land tenure structure of the zone and benefits only an insignificant number of campesinos. The truth is that the whole mechanism set up by our law and that of other Latin American nations resembles the pilot project approach to which defenders of the status quo are fond of having recourse when the solution of social conflicts is involved. But the economic, social and political conditions of Latin American agriculture are obviously beyond the pilot project approach. In Colombia this method has been carried out most systematically -- with disastrous results for the entire land reform program and the peasants. There the argument was that each province ought first to have one land reform project of relatively small scope before other projects could be started -- on the ridiculous assumption that if one province were left out from the programing, its political leaders would die of envy, protest to the central government and boycott the program! In that country land reform has also been a dismal failure by any criterion except that of the necessity to preserve the status quo.
The pilot project or piecemeal approach to land reform is born out of the profound distrust of the landed elite for the peasants. They do not believe that the peasantry is "ripe" for | land reform (which is true in the sense that the peasants do not conform to the idea which the estate owners have formed of a good agrarian structure which is "more of the same" of what already exists) and they insist that the peasants must first be shown and educated how to farm. This is laughable since the peasants -- not the landed elite -- have done the farm work for centuries. Incorporated in the land reform legislation, it serves to delay the land reform process or postpone it indefinitely. [184]
Latin American land reform laws incorporate not only concepts about the campesinos held dear by the landed elite, but also unrealistic concepts about agriculture and its economics. In a nutshell, the legislators have shut their eyes to the fact that most estates are farmed at prehistoric levels of technology and farm management, that their land is badly underutilized or unused, that farms are progressively decapitalized,8 and that these elements are among the principal reasons for carrying out a land reform (the most important element being, of course, the unequal distribution of resources). Rather, legislators tended to make a virtue out of these shortcomings of latifundio agriculture. Instead of permitting that reform be carried out on the best soils, in the best, most densely populated agricultural areas -- as true land reformers would attempt to do -- they have introduced a classification of farms and farm land for purpose of expropriation which relegates reform to distant, marginal areas where agriculture is still relatively undeveloped and have excluded from expropriation certain types of estates altogether. Legislation has reduced the area available for distribution to peasants to small (in some cases insignificant) proportions of all land controlled by the landed elite. It has transformed land reform into a colonization scheme. In other words, instead of considering all estates belonging to the landed elite as subject to reform (as it ought to), the law destines some lands to it and excludes the remainder. Let us have a closer look at these provisions.
In the legislation of Colombia, for example, privately owned land is specifically relegated to a second rank. It provides that land reform will be carried out first on public lands (this cannot possibly be called a reform) and on private land only "if it appears necessary."9 But if privately owned farms are [185] to be expropriated, priority is given (by law) to farm land which is not cultivated and to inadequately managed land; then to farms operated with tenants or sharecroppers; and in the last place to land which is adequately managed but only if its owners dispose of it voluntarily. These are quite obviously highly defective provisions from the point of view of a reformer. In the first place the law does not distinguish between land which is "not cultivated" and "idle (fallow)" land -- a serious omission. Most of the idle land in Latin America -- evidence of antiquated farming techniques for the most part -- is in the hands of the estate owners. The proportion of idle land increases with the size of the farm. In Brazil, for example, it amounted to three times the amount of land in crops on the large estates! In strict interpretation then, all this idle land would be excluded from expropriation as, from the point of view of Latin American latifundistas, it cannot be assumed to be "inadequately farmed." It is probably also no accident that the law suddenly switches from farms to land: it does not talk about inadequately managed farms, but land. The effect of this is that if an estate owner cultivates only his best land as he usually does, so that it is difficult on legal grounds to pretend that this portion is "inadequately managed," only marginal areas of the estate would become available for expropriation and distribution to peasants. Hence, the legislator intended to relegate the beneficiaries of land reform to the poorest and least developed areas. This tends to minimize the danger that the beneficiaries can be successful on their new plots and tends to discredit land reform: if the peasants have poor crops and cannot get ahead, land reform must be bad for the peasants!10 [186]
But then also entire categories of estates are totally exempt. Usually by law (and sometimes by gentlemen's agreement) the government will not touch sugar, cotton and other plantations or other "well-managed" farm enterprises, on the theory that large, efficient management-units must not be disturbed and that antisocial labor relations which may exist there are not of consequence for the land reform process. A legislative climax has been reached in Ecuador where feudal labor relations and peasant unrest are notorious; farms up to 3,500 hectares (about 8,000 acres) in the coastal plains where farming conditions are favorable or of 1,800 hectares in the high plains where soils are often exhausted and eroded are exempt from reform and if an estate owner repents and improves his management he can also be freed from expropriation. In Ecuador, therefore, there is almost nothing left by law to benefit the peasants with. In Peru corporations are legally exempt for all practical purposes -- a step which is rumored to have been preceded and followed by a rash of new incorporations of estates until it became evident that no serious
[187] land reform was to be carried out.11 Many more examples could be furnished.
It is clear that the legislators had an exalted conception of the importance and scope of good farm management in Latin America and that they tended to equate large size with good management. In actuality the number of large, well-run farm operations is very small. Intensively and efficiently cultivated land is but a tiny fraction of all farm land controlled by the landed elite. Even on plantations much land is unused or underutilized. On the other hand, plantation owners often claim huge areas in addition to their intensively farmed land on the pretext that they are necessary to carry out the cultivations. For example, sugar-cane growers claim that they need tens of thousands of acres of pasture land (which is often cultivable) to raise oxen to transport sugar cane -- a thinly disguised argument to monopolize more good land. In the laws good management was made the rule and bad management the exception and reform was relegated to the exception.
Behind the exalted opinion of the legislators stands the attempt of the landed elite to shift land reform away from its goal of greater social justice to what they consider a politically neutral one of productivity and efficiency. Their reasoning is simple and attractive. Their alleged fear is that land reform would result in lowering output if "large and efficient" farms were to be expropriated. (Here again is the vestige of the elite's arrogant assertion that the peasants are unable to farm.) Hence, these enterprises must be maintained and exempted from reform, even at the risk of maintaining objectionable social injustice.12 This is a favorite argument of [188] the Counterreformists. It is tricky and of course loaded with politics favorable to them. In the first place, there is no reason to assume that land reform (a) lowers agricultural output and (b) lowers output on "large and efficient" farms. There is demonstrably so much unused or underutilized land on the large estates that its redistribution to peasants would automatically result in greater food production. Even if it is assumed that output on "large and efficient" units were to decrease, this would be more than offset by the more intensive use on the previously immense areas of poorly used land. But why should output decrease on the "large and efficient" farms which are expropriated? The opposite is just as likely to occur. Good management is not -- like the ownership of land -- a monopoly of the landed elite. (What might occur is that the output of certain products -- sugar, cotton, coffee -- might decline. These are generally produced, processed, marketed or exported by the members of the landed elite. But a shift from monocultures to diversified agriculture would be in most cases a real blessing.) What is tricky about the use of concepts like "efficient" or "adequately managed" as criteria for expropriation is of course that they cannot be objectively defined. They are slippery concepts and there is little reason why every estate owner cannot be interpreted to farm his land efficiently, particularly if the interpretation is in his own hands.
Finally, reform laws include provisions which are still more openly antagonistic to the peasants or very harmful to them. One type has its origin in the landed elite's desire to preserve for themselves a source of cheap labor, always dependent on them for employment and a living. Peru abolished feudal tenure rights (e.g. the granting of tiny plots of land, which fixes the peasants on the farm in exchange for the peasants' obligation to work on the landlord's estate)18 in the mid-1960's [189] and transformed the feudal plot holders into owners of these plots. At first sight, this seemed to be a magnificent gesture to make at one stroke thousands of reform beneficiaries out of former serfs. In reality it was a great demagogic feat, a last-minute addition to the law which caught most legislators unaware, to "pacify" the restless peasantry. It had and continues to have a nefarious impact.14 If the law had been implemented it would condemn these peasants to become smallholders unable to make a living on their tiny plots in the long run. However, only a handful of feudal peasants were actually transformed into owners although several hundred thousand campesinos registered with the government in order to be able to claim the right granted them by law, in the belief that a tiny plot in ownership provides greater security and freedom than any other tenure into which they had been forced for generations. The reason was that instead of declaring that the peasants become automatically owners of their plots on the date of the law's promulgation, the law required that the reform agency had to indemnify the estate owners for the plots before the serfs became owners; and shortage of funds plus high prices demanded by the estate owners made the implementation of the law impossible. On the other hand estate owners used the delay to free themselves of thousands of their feudal workers (at times by burning the huts in which they lived or by other violent means) and of their obligation to hand the plots over to them. They forced them [190] off the land and into wage employment or the cities15 -- a clear-cut example of how land reform, legislated and carried out by the estate owners, can be converted into open Counterreform. The peasants were pacified for the time being (or were they?) and a new source of discontent and frustration was created.
And then there are provisions which relay the impression that the peasants are enemies to be contained. In the Peruvian land reform legislation, for example, acts undertaken by "persons" (meaning peasants and their leaders) against the landed elite are punished by excluding them from the benefits of land reform. But landlords who incite and provoke peasants and fabricate fictitious cases of disturbance in order to exclude them from land reform (there are such cases) remain unpunished. A mild sanction against such estate owners would be to expropriate their farms at once without compensation. But it is a rare clause which contains any sanction against a landlord's violation of the spirit or text of the land reform legislation, and there is none for activities directed against peasant rights.
The reader might think that this brief analysis of Latin America's land reform legislation of the 1960's (and probably the 1970's too) is so much wasted print. If so, we believe that he may have missed an important point. This legislation which is the most tangible portion of the Counterreform is also one of the crucial elements of the "land reform" programs in the hemisphere. The reforms of the 1960's pretend to be rational reforms. Rational reforms pretend to be planned and peaceful changes of the agrarian structure. To be peaceful, they must be carried out legally, within the framework of the constitutions and the body of statutes which govern the various phases of reform, including of course the reform laws themselves. Legality must be preserved. In the 1960's, the land reform laws are the land reforms.
In all societies, the law can serve to freeze the existing structure of society and to give an aura of respectability and legality to severe social injustice, or it can serve (within limits) [191] to bring about greater justice by ordering the reallocation of resources and a greater balance of rights and obligations, if these can be properly enforced. But what the law cannot accomplish is to modify the existing political power structure. It is itself only a mirror of the power structure. It could hardly be expected that the landed elite which is better represented in the legislative bodies of the hemisphere than any other sector of Latin American society, would voluntarily legislate away its own power and privileges through a radical land reform statute. And even if it were to do it, such a law would not be enforced. Theirs is an understandable attitude. Their reform laws must be designed to preserve, as best as can be, the status quo and at the same time make it appear that great changes are in the offing. Our task is to detect and expose the sham. The very complexities of legislation and the refined methods used by the legislators to hide their real intent make it difficult to discover the true character of the legislation. For this the brief analysis of the web of limitations and restrictions, contradictions, obscurities and legal tricks, which we attempted above, is necessary.
THE LANDED ELITE'S COUNTERREFORM WEB The Mexican government gave about 150 million acres of farm land to two million peasant families in the course of fifty years following the peasant revolution of the 1910's. The Mexican land reform got off to a relatively slow start and most of the land was distributed in the 1930's. Still, every year on the average about 3 million acres were given to some forty thousand farm families.
All the combined Latin American nations other than Mexico and Cuba, over a six- or eight-year period during the 1960's, have barely achieved, by stretching the statistics, what was accomplished in Mexico in an average year.16 Perhaps we are only at the beginning of a massive transformation of [192] the agrarian structure there, but the outlook is now that in the foreseeable future there will be no further land reform in the hemisphere beyond what was achieved between 1960 and 1968.17 Here is why.
In the better cases, land reform in the hemisphere developed as follows. Legislation is passed and a land reform institute is established as provided by law. It might be staffed in part by a few progressive young men who enthusiastically seek to enforce the legislation. The institute is furnished with sufficient (at times with more than sufficient) funds to organize the complex bureaucracy thought to be necessary to carry out what some of the staff think will become a rather comprehensive land reform program. Branch offices are set up in various parts of the country. Projects for expropriation, redistribution and settlement are prepared in detail. Beneficiaries are selected from lists of eligible peasants. Usually this period of great upsurge takes about two to three years. At the end of the period a few hundred (and in a few isolated [193] cases a couple of thousand, except for Venezuela where the number is reported to have reached over fifty thousand)18 farm families have received plots of land. But even in the best of cases, the number of beneficiaries is only a very small, and in most instances an infinitesimal, fraction of the peasants who are potential land reformees. It is only a fraction of the yearly increase in the farm population. Then the activities stop. The institute still continues to exist, but it vegetates -- its projects unfinished, its funds nearly dried up. Its staff is decimated and enthusiasm has given way to disillusionment. There are other instances where all the motions of setting up a big institute have been gone through, but where it was made clear from the start that the institute would engage in many activities related to agriculture minus land reform.
More Counterreform has been at work. This time we have to turn to politics to see how it functions. Let us examine how it operates at the government level and how individuals or groups participate in it.
First it helps to know how a land reform institute functions. Its organization is usually spelled out in some detail by the law. The legislators have seen to it that all activities of the institute and its directors are closely controlled by a policymaking and supervisory body (a board or council) which is a faithful reproduction of the political and economic power structure of the country. Its members are the ministers of agriculture and other high functionaries of the ministry, the directors of the large and powerful agricultural credit institutions, agricultural development corporations and the major organizations of large estate owners (e.g. the cattle-owners' association), representatives of the legislature and of urban labor and one peasant representative, usually the head of a government-sponsored peasant organization. The peasants in this body are strictly outnumbered and outvoted (if they can be said to be represented at all), and they can exercise of course practically no influence on the institute's activities. Only by a long stretch of the imagination can it be asserted [194] that this executive branch of the institute -- the board or council -- is sincerely interested in carrying out a land reform. The fact of the matter is that some of its members are bound to be outright opponents of any concessions to the campesinos. Of course the inclusion of representatives of the large estate owners with decision-making power in a government agency whose function is to execute the will of the legislator (i.e. to undertake a land reform) is a legal, political, and administrative monstrosity. They are allowed to curb government policy without having any responsibility to anyone except to their own private group. It is a built-in sabotage system. The institute's director's job is to goad the board into action. He is not a revolutionary reformer, of course. He is much in the same position as the administrator of a large estate, chosen for his administrative capabilities and political acumen in order to see to it that the foundation of society and the imbalance of political and social power are not upset and that law and tradition are adhered to.19 He is not accountable for his work and that of the institute to the campesinos, but to the board. In order to be certain that the director cannot be subjected to undue pressures in favor of much reform, he is legally and administratively insulated against any further campesino participation. The campesinos or their organizations do not participate in any of the phases of the program -- not in its planning, nor in the selection of projects or of beneficiaries nor in its execution -- and it is a rare institute whose higher staff is not composed 100 per cent of white-collar workers many of whom spend most of their time in their city offices. The only method by which the institute enters occasionally into direct contact with the peasants is for the latter to send delegations to present their views to the institute officials.
The fact that, as we stated earlier, young professionals with progressive ideas had entered the institutes in the belief that the time for a change in Latin American agriculture had come, often produced political infighting between them and the administration of the institutes. These men who have had by [195] far the best contacts with the peasantry deserve the highest respect for the devotion with which they have approached their work, for the long hours of toil and the professional and other risks they have faced (as we shall point out). Most of their efforts are already past history. Their struggle has practically always been solved in favor of the administration -- i.e. the landed elite. Usually the changes in the political climate which came about during the mid-1960's (after peasant discontent was successfully contained and the landed aristocracy was again riding high) brought more representatives of the estate owners into high positions even in the technical departments. In one country, for example, the programing of land reform is now in the hands of a farm owner, spokesman for the landed elite. He was put into this crucial position in response to political pressure from them. As a result the activities of the institute became highly beneficial to the estate owners -- e.g., a road-building program which improved the real-estate values of the adjoining estates -- and set their minds completely at rest with regard to the expropriation of privately owned farm land.
The situation is a great deal simpler in countries where the staff is composed from the very beginning of representatives of the landed elite so that all phases of the reform program are handled immediately by the landed elite itself. Such a situation has occurred, for example, in a country with a military regime which introduced into the institute high-ranking members of the armed forces with the aim of protecting the interests of the landowning class with which they are closely identified. Under these circumstances reform programs can be completely bypassed while other projects are undertaken "in the name of land reform" to strengthen the already powerful position of the landed elite.
The simplest method to undercut an institute and with it the reform program is to deprive it of funds. In country after country where some hope for a tiny land reform existed, parliamentary allocations were sharply reduced after the second or third year, or the treasury simply failed to locate sufficient funds, at times in open violation of previous commitments or of the law. Occasionally the cuts were made in devious ways so that it was hard to argue that the real victim [196] was land reform.20 Broadside, well-organized and at times vicious attacks in the press, radio and television were usually launched against the accomplishments of the institutes and their methods of work and were then used as arguments to defend the budget cuts. Institutes were accused of mishandling funds, of botching settlement or other projects, of unsound judgment. In Peru a very successful project which settled hundreds of peasant families on an immense estate was criticized on the basis of mismanagement when in truth the peasant beneficiaries had successfully shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were much better farmers by a wide margin than the former latifundio owner.21 Another method is the following: Since it takes considerable time to plan and execute projects under the law, some institutes were unable to spend all their funds at once. This was then used as proof of mismanagement and poor administration and accordingly no more funds were allocated. The programs with the best start suffered usually the most serious financial setbacks. There are now several institutes which are left with just enough funds to pay office rent and salaries for the (by now sharply reduced) staff, to buy paper and ink to prepare outlines for future projects and for public relations to convince a skeptical audience that their puny activities are in reality great accomplishments or that the country has already outgrown its needs for land reform.22
It would be naive in the extreme to assume that lack of [197] public funds is at the bottom of these budget cuts. In Peru, for example, plans for immense irrigation schemes in the desert were publicized requiring hundreds of millions of dollars -- much in excess of what land reform was ever allotted -- at the very moment when the institute could barely make ends meet. The truth is that the landed elite had by that time pointed its big guns at the budget committees of the legislature and on the executive and shot away any sympathetic support which might have existed there for continuing the little land reform program which had previously been legislated into existence. The truth is that the governments and their agencies simply depend on the landed elite for survival.
Another clever move has been to make "slight" administrative changes in the organization of the land reform institutes in relation to other government agencies. Thus it could happen for example that one morning the director of an institute who was until now directly responsible to the president of his country found himself under the orders of the minister of agriculture (he is always the representative of the large estate owners, of the growers of export crops or of the powerful livestock growers) with a corresponding curtailment of his decision-making powers. Another simple, much-used strategy has been to make life difficult or dangerous for institute officials. Attacks against the administrative and technical staff as a group or as individuals -- particularly those known to be in favor of reform -- range all the way from threats against their life or that of their family, or attempts at subornation, to rumor-mongering that the officials are dishonest, incompetent or subversive. The governments do not have the power or the courage to support their own officials against these open or hidden attacks of the landed elite. In one country a high-ranking official falsely accused of mishandling funds had to use his time to defend himself in court instead of on his land reform program; another was accused of being a communist; a third was threatened with jail when he tried to enforce the law. Again, the more vigorous the beginning of the institute's activities, the more violent usually the elite's reaction. Few good technicians (they are normally not plentiful in any Latin American country) now dare join a land reform institute as agronomists, planners or in some other professional [198] capacity because of the risks to their reputation, their health and their life. In a sense, these professionals (who are usually white-collar workers from the middle class with a sense of social responsibility) now experience a treatment which campesinos have suffered for generations.
Recently the elite's attacks, which in the beginning had been discreet and subdued, have become open and unashamed. The hostilities are directed not only against the government agency, but also more frequently against the campesinos themselves. The estate owners who are rumored to have stocked arms in their haciendas for any future eventual confrontation with the frustrated peasantry, daily persecute and punish the campesinos or their leaders who take advantage of the privileges accorded them by the land reform legislation. In 1968, peasants who attempted to organize a cooperative in one country where feudal labor relations are notorious were whipped by the administrator of an estate. And to make things worse: the incident occurred on an estate on which the government was beginning to carry out a land reform project! Any attempt at forming peasant syndicates or leagues is systematically and ruthlessly stamped out, the leaders jailed or eliminated, the members punished or intimidated. If estate owners were giving their peasants financial "assistance" (at usurious interest rates) they now withdraw this aid altogether on the pretext that "the government furnishes aid" to the peasants, knowing fully well that the government (i.e. the reform institute) does not help the peasants because the estate owners prevent it from doing so. In this manner the peasantry of Latin America is forced by the landed elite into violent reaction. It is not the peasantry which is the aggressor, but the landed elite.
What is the campesinos' attitude toward their land reform institute? Its organization does not permit, as we said earlier, the slightest cooperation with the peasants. The law itself has made of the agency a paternalistic entity in the best tradition. Its legal paternalism in turn is compounded by the attitude of many officials, friends or admirers of the elite, who find their way into employment there as by coincidence and treat the peasants in the traditional manorial manner. [199]
To the element of superior class consciousness on the part of the landed oligarchy in and outside of the institute, one must also add the racial issue in many areas of the hemisphere, although Latin Americans often deny the existence of racial biases.23 The Indians of the Andean regions, for example, are not considered to be on a par in intelligence, industriousness, business acumen and, of course, social acceptability with the powerful landlords although they are doing all the farm work from sunrise to sundown and are heirs to a fine agriculture in which soil conservation, irrigation and intensive cultivation -- now replaced by the highly wasteful farming practices introduced by the Spanish occupants -- were at a premium. Similar conditions prevail in other regions.
No one has been quicker to understand that the institutes were from the start, or were soon to become, instruments of the landed elite to quell reform aspirations than the campesinos themselves. This was an inescapable conclusion from their point of view, given the political developments of the decade. No wonder therefore that the Latin American campesinos viewed the reform efforts of the 1960's with customary well-justified suspicion. If the peasants were to support openly the institutes, this would immediately be interpreted as subversion directed against the institutes and the agrarian structure. One of the peasants in Brazil put their reaction in a nutshell: for him there had been no observable change between the feudal landlord for whom he had worked since childhood and his new landlord, the institute, which had taken over the property. Not all peasants understand precisely the meaning of land reform. But all of them know that it means something better than what they have been accustomed to for generations. For some it implies the elimination of the estates and a hated system of forced labor; for others, the promise of a piece of land or higher wages and security. They adopted a "wait and see" policy as soon as they became aware of the gap between the promises of their political leaders and the oratory on one side (everybody now talks in favor of land [200] reform) and concrete achievements on the other. It is true that a few privileged peasant families have obtained land others are on a waiting list. But they also know that for every family which has benefited from government action there are 10,000, 100,000, 200,000 families who have not, and that the gap is growing. It does not take a very sophisticated mind to become suspicious of the intentions of political leaders if of five million campesino families who are potential land reform beneficiaries in a country like Brazil only a few hundred receive plots of land. (Nor do the campesinos forget that in Guatemala the families who had received land from the Arbenz government were chased off their plots, and in some cases severely punished when the government fell.) For the peasantry of Latin America little, if anything, has changed in the 1960's. For quite a few peasants, life seems bleaker.
Finally, brief mention must be made of the relationship between the land reform institutes and other agencies of the government in or outside of agriculture. Can a land reform agency function properly when the remainder of the public sector is indifferent at best or hostile in the extreme to an "effective transformation" of the land tenure system? Experience in Latin America shows that the institutes were at first looked at with envy, because they absorbed many good technicians and a portion of the public funds which had been formerly allocated to other, older agencies, only to be subsequently sabotaged by them, at the national or local levels. The fact is that the various government entities other than the institute also are effective instruments of the landed elite to carry out the Counterreform. Governors of states or provinces who are also millionaire landlords with substantial financial interests in agriculture and allied industries or the export business (and there are many of those), directors of public (or semipublic) credit agencies, judges on the national or local courts, heads of rural labor courts or of Indian agencies, police chiefs, prefects of towns or villages, all with similar financial interests as the governors, have used their offices to assist the landed elite in its efforts to make the implementation of the land reform legislation difficult or impossible. Either they do not cooperate with the institutes, [201] which they are bound to cooperate with under the law, or they actively sabotage them.
We can even amplify the question put in the beginning of the preceding paragraph: Can a land reform program succeed in an economy which is geared to the functioning of an agriculture based on the latifundio system, where peasants are only exploited and marginal, where the private credit agencies, the marketing channels for inputs or outputs are structured to maintain, fortify or subsidize the estate owners and assist them to produce and market the products they grow? Take the following case which occurred recently in Brazil. The land reform institute encourages and subsidizes a small cooperative to be formed by members of a new settlement project. (Most land reform laws provide that beneficiaries must form cooperatives. They are usually bound to fail because no cooperative with a few dozen members can long survive.) A few producers are about to sell their first crop through this cooperative, but find they cannot market it and the crop is lost. Established dealers in the area have maneuvered so that the first experience of the cooperative results in failure because they see in it a threat of competition. The institute is unable or unwilling to confront the traditional channels of marketing. As a result, land reform beneficiaries are obliged to sell to established dealers on an individual basis, unable to resist the lower prices and unfavorable terms customary in the area for small producers. The outlook is that these beneficiaries will soon be in the same position as other smallholders -- unable to accumulate savings, indebted to the dealers and at the margin of the economy. Cooperatives are still considered subversive in most of Latin America. Without radical changes in other sectors of the economy which accompany land tenure changes, land reform programs are unlikely to be very successful.
THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF LANDED ELITE POWER With the exception of a few tolerated labor unions or clandestine militant groups, Latin America's peasants and farm workers are unorganized. Without large-scale organizations, [202] they have no political or economic leverage. As social political and economic conditions worsen in the rural sector they are again beginning to resort to violence on a larger scale.24 The outlook is that strife will grow in the next few years and that open or clandestine peasant organizations will spring up as a defense against landed elite aggression.
The landed elite has a significant head start in opposing and repressing existing or impending peasant movements. In sharp contrast to the campesinos and conveniently overlooked is the effective organization of estate owners for collective action. They have formed economic and political pressure groups more powerful than any other sector in Latin America and they count with many of the resources necessary to give full expression and support to their favorite economic, social and political views. Estate owners do not see eye to eye with their peers in all matters. At times they are bitter competitors for available inputs, such as land or capital. They have formed commodity groups for the defense of the crops they grow -- livestock, coffee, wheat, rice, cotton -- and changing market conditions bring about conflicts with respect to price controls, credit or subsidies. But estate owners are always united with respect to the maintenance of the foundations of their society and vis-a-vis the peasantry. The defense of the status quo is in the hands of the commodity groups and of general associations (like the United States' Farm Bureau) which usually go under the name of Sociedades de Agricultores, where the term agricultores stands for the large, normally absentee estate or plantation owners. Many of these so-called agricultores are politicians, businessmen, farm equipment dealers, lawyers or doctors. They defend to the last stand their right to control, as they see fit, a poor, powerless, dependent rural labor force, the mainstay of their latifundio agriculture. The sociedades always have a hand in shaping agricultural policies. They have interfered in the passage of land reform legislation (by preparing and introducing in parliaments their [203] own versions of "land reform" statutes, by making their views known in their trade journals, by exerting pressure in the legislatures, etc.) and in its execution.
During the 1960's, a new element appeared on the horizon: elite organization on the inter-American level. It operates throughout the hemisphere and has ramifications in Washington and New York. The activities of the group or groups, such as the A.A.A.A.,25 are not publicized. Their meetings, discussions and resolutions on common strategies against the peasantry and land-reform mongers are a closely guarded secret. They also send observers or participants to other hemisphere conferences or congresses. Although secretive, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their international collective action has had concrete results. Common strategy reveals itself like a fanfare, for example in the similarity of land reform laws and of their built-in Counterreform mechanisms and of the maneuvers to sabotage the implementation of the laws or the activities of the institutes.
The great Counterreform of the 1960's took place at about the same time when the military began again to intervene actively in most Latin American nations. In the words of one expert, "between 1962 and 1967 [the period for which we have described the Counterreform] a new wave of militarism has been sweeping across Latin America. Between March 1962 and June 1966 nine duly elected, constitutional, civilian presidents were deposed by military coups." Of eighteen Latin American countries, eight had in 1967, and still had in 1968, "purely military regimes";26 in five countries there is a "heavy indirect military influence upon politics";27 and five countries were with "non-political military establishments"28 -- [204] to use the same observer's terminology. Of course no strong statistical correlation could be run between (1) land reform, (2) Counterreform, (3) democracy and (4) military dictatorships. The fact that in thirteen countries with military or quasi-military governments controlling about 90 per cent of the hemisphere between Mexico and the South Pole, land reforms have either been squashed, or never came off the ground, or have stagnated, would indicate that military rule and social reforms are, to put it conservatively, not compatible in today's Latin America. (Military men are fond of equating reforms with communism.) But that in the remaming five countries there were no land reforms either does not contradict this argument. It merely shows that the landed elite can carry out Counterreform, under the favorable circumstances under which they can manipulate it, without yet having to rely directly on the intervention of the armies. After all, there are a great many ways not to carry out a land reform. If circumstances were to turn less favorable, an appeal to the military could rapidly re-establish the "disequilibrium balance" in these countries too.
The above-quoted observer sums up the effects of the "resurgent counter-revolutionary militarism" of the 1960's as follows:
The social consequences of the interventions were to halt, or to slow down, the reform programs advocated by the civilian governments the military deposed, or by those they prevented from achieving power. . . . the Latin American military today has adopted a conservative position on the issue of social reform.29Military interventions to halt or slow down land reforms are evidence of extreme disequilibrium in Latin America. The landed elite's response to increasing pressures by the campesinos [205] for more land and other benefits -- necessary consequences of irreversible economic, social and political trends -- is new and increased repression and violence with the help of arms in order to avoid compromises with the campesinos. Is such a policy evidence of a position of strength? Is it evidence of the tenuous position of the landed elite? On balance their appeal to the armed forces to support their kind of agriculture must be interpreted as a sign that their system is coming apart at the seams. History suggests that the more untenable a social system, the more violent become the means which its defenders employ to brace it up. (This was the case of slavery in North America's antebellum South.) The end of the latifundio system is not yet in sight. A social system can maintain itself by pure physical force for some considerable time. The real question is whether in the face of all the millions of hungry, discontented and rebellious antagonists, the landed elite is capable of handling present and imminent rural social conflicts with or without the help of the Latin American military alone. This brings us to some of the international aspects of the land reform programs and of Counterreform.
Coinciding with the Cuban revolution which split the apparently common front of the Americas in two physically highly unequal parts there appeared, practically for the first time in official U.S.-Latin American relations, a sincere preoccupation with antiquated land tenure systems and squalid rural poverty and their impact on Latin America's welfare. Land reform became a subject of international concern. If peasant discontent were to break out on a wide scale and reforms were to pursue a course similar to the one in Cuba, the existing power structure in the hemisphere could be upset and relations between the U.S. and Latin America enter into a new, undesirable phase. Given the undeniable existence of a highly conflictive inequality in the distribution of economic and political power in the rural sector and its obvious threat to political stability and continued U.S. hegemony, the best approach to avoid an upheaval was to guide land reforms into controllable channels through appropriate international agreements and mechanisms. This seems to have been the goal of the Charter of Punta del Este (1961), the foundation of the [206] Alliance for Progress. The Charter is a remarkable, almost revolutionary document. For the first time in recent history it spoke with frankness of the place of social and institutional reforms in the process of development. Development was not any more a purely economic matter -- of more capital investments, of slightly improved price and credit policies, of more efficient marketing channels or of better farm management -- but a function of fundamental changes in basic institutions. Economic growth had to be preceded, not only accompanied, by social reforms as the new basis for an economic growth take-off.
This theory is of course not new. It has been defended since time immemorial by social scientists and politicians who, not being intellectual slaves to a given social system, have understood that progress consists in spreading the benefits which society can distribute to the largest possible number of beneficiaries, and in eliminating the institutional barriers which given social systems set up to prevent their diffusion. But what was new is that it was incorporated as the basic dogma of an international policy agreement.30
The Charter gave highest priority to agrarian reforms. It encouraged the "effective transformation of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use" through peaceful and legal means to avoid that it be achieved by revolution, as in Cuba and many other countries throughout the world. However, it did not set up an international organization to enforce its policy in the same manner whereby, for example, international commodity agreements are carried out, that is, by providing sanctions against nations which do not comply with the agreements. It is true that land reform had become a matter of international concern, but it had not yet become an international matter, so to speak, and there is not yet a world market for land reforms. Reforms remain essentially a purely internal matter for national governments to carry out or to reject so that sanctions are not feasible under existing conditions, although of course the Charter has made a slight dent in this separation between national and inter-American affairs. [207] It used international (read: primarily United States) technical and financial assistance as incentive (or encouragement) to coax Latin American governments into adopting these reforms.31
The policy was a simple one: any nation which carried out social reforms was eligible to become a recipient of Alliance for Progress (read: principally United States) assistance. There was no corresponding obligation for the United States to undertake changes in order to effectively encourage land reform in case any of its institutions proved to be inimical to Latin American land reform, nor could Latin America enforce such a change if necessary although, as we shall see, such a request would not necessarily be presumptuous. Hence the success of the Charter depended on the effectiveness with which the Alliance could enforce its "carrot and soft stick" policy and on Latin American willingness to undertake land reform in compensation of financial and technical assistance.
In order to be consistent, the U.S., which contributed most of the Alliance funds (which in turn gave it a decisive voice in shaping the Alliance program), had to cling systematically to the simple principle "no reform, no assistance." There is little doubt, however, that such a simple and clear-cut policy entailed certain risks for current U.S.-Latin American relations, at least from the point of view of those who wanted no fundamental changes in these relations as they existed at that time and have continued to exist since. In other words, to them the dogma of the Charter, which on paper seemed to inaugurate a new era in Inter-American politics, with the U.S. taking the leadership in a progressive and liberal program to do away with poverty and social injustices, was inconsistent with reality as they saw it. The apparent dilemma is the result of the permanently shaky economic and political situation in which practically all Latin American nations find themselves. They depend on immediate and permanent foreign financial [208] assistance not only for economic growth and some semblance of political stability, but also for recurrent catastrophic foreign exchange crises. To withhold financial aid when these governments fail to undertake reforms could -- so it seemed -- bring about precisely the revolutions which the Charter wished to avoid or drive governments into seeking and accepting assistance from other parts of the world. (In fact this may have happened in the case of Brazil when President Goulart appeared to actually want to carry out land reform as the Charter stipulated. Before he began, however, he was overthrown by a military coup in 1964 and U.S. financial and military aid came forth without reforms.) Continued dependence of Latin American nations on the U.S. could not well be jeopardized by insistence on wild-eyed land reforms.
So the simple mechanism of the Alliance seemed to be politically unenforceable. The danger of not receiving assistance as a "sanction" for noncompliance with the Charter, i.e. for not carrying out reforms, was never a real one for Latin American governments when they read U.S. politics correctly. The U.S. had signed a document in which it apparently could not really believe. (When the U.S. chose to ignore the Charter and gave its blessing to more "realistic" policies, it adopted a convenient short-run alternative with unpredictable consequences in the long run unless the "realistic" policies can eliminate the U.S.'s "back yard of starving people." Of course this seems almost impossible without reforms.)
The break with the Charter came slowly and expressed itself in two related ways: on the intellectual level in a progressive de-emphasis of reforms as a prerequisite for growth until this principle was replaced by an entirely new one; and in side-stepping, in practice, reforms as a prerequisite for receiving assistance. The Charter dogma clashed almost at once with U.S. business which looked at land reform of any shape or kind as a threat to U.S. interests and investments abroad and as subversive. Great pressure was exerted on the leaders of the Alliance to soft-pedal reforms. Soon, in their frequent travels to Latin American nations, the chiefs of the Alliance visited housing, irrigation, extension or business-management-school projects, and sites for Alliance-funded manufacturing plants and ignored land reform projects and institutes. U.S. [209] AID missions, whose function it was to implement the policies laid down by the Charter, were disengaging themselves vigorously from the reform activities undertaken in the countries in which they were operating, on the pretext that these countries were not yet ready for land reform projects except on a tiny ("pilot project") scale. Ambassadors mixed indiscreetly with large estate owners or their organizations, no doubt to reassure them that the Charter was not to be taken seriously.32
This turnabout in policy was quickly understood in the hemisphere, all the more because the Latin governments continued to receive assistance, in the form of loans from a variety of U.S. or U.S.-sponsored agencies, without carrying out reforms but by merely complying with certain formalities which made it appear as if they were following the Charter principle to the letter. The observance of the Charter became almost a farce: governments passed land reform laws and organized institutes, as we have seen, to preserve appearances and the U.S. accepted their actions at face value, without seriously examining whether or not reforms were being carried out. Again, land reform laws and institutes were becoming the land reforms, for the purposes of the Alliance. (The violation of the Charter was equally serious with respect to other reforms, like tax or educational reforms which were discussed but never seriously considered in Latin America.)
The U.S. government had no difficulty in finding intellectual support to justify its undeclared war on the Charter. Even in academic circles numerous antagonists could demonstrate that reforms were not an answer to development and their arguments were picked up enthusiastically by Counterreformists on the U.S. home front and in the hemisphere, including slow-moving institutes. The most popular U.S.-bred theory against reform is that which wants to "take politics out of [210] land reform" and looks at it as a program to increase the economic efficiency of agriculture, a job for technical experts. "Technical reforms" became the slogan of the 1960's.33 The theory of the apolitical reform may sound plausible to some people, but it is about as absurd as proposals to solve the Negro problem in the U.S. through housing projects (which de-house rather than re-house Negroes) or through clinical psychology for Negroes unadjusted to white middle-class society. Contrary to what its defenders think of it, it is loaded with politics -- of the status quo. It works as follows. If agricultural productivity is to be increased, technicians must be put to work in order to determine the optimum conditions under which land settlements can be successful. These conditions can be determined only through systematic research and the use of the most modern and refined methods of statistical and economic analyses (including input-output models). Electronic computers should be used to deal with the numerous variables entering into the equations and to provide precise answers. An important part of the analysis is the determination of the "optimum farm size" for the plots to be handed over to the land reform beneficiaries. The [211] research must be preceded by careful gathering of information on soils, water supplies, climate, demand and supply conditions of the major crops grown in the country and the impact of land reform projects on foreign exchange earnings, not to speak of the impact of crops grown in the projects on the supply and demand of the crops not grown there. (The one factor about which ample knowledge exists, the intolerable social system and its impact on the farm people, is of course not included in the computations.) Since most of these data are never available, the technicians spend several years before an answer can be found to the questions asked and before campesinos can be allowed access to the land. The process must be repeated innumerable times as land reform projects are always carried out in regions with entirely different agricultural conditions. Land reform is delayed.
Even the most idealistic reform-monger cannot fail to discover that the theory is less naive than meets the eye: modern methods of research, completely divorced from the fundamental problem of agriculture, which is the political issue of social justice and the redistribution of resources and political power, are simply used to postpone social change. "Technical reform" aims at reversing the process of land reform. Instead of solving the political issue first through large-scale expropriations and the replacement of latifundios (as the Charter states), it postpones it until all the elements for proceeding with the reform are known -- sometimes ad infinitum.
But technical reforms are useless only for Latin American peasants. They are very profitable for electronic computer firms, dealers of agricultural equipment, private consultant and land-mapping firms (unless maps are made by the U.S. Air Force) and above all for land-grant-college economists and professors of business management eager to apply their outer-space econometrics and principles of advanced accounting to the primitive socioeconomic conflicts of Latin American peasantry, which they obviously ignore.
"Technical reform" has been applied with fervor, and at times has had almost amusing consequences, except that its costs have to be borne entirely by the campesinos who have done the farm work for generations. In Brazil, for example, many hundred thousand dollars were spent by the institute on [212] detailed settlement projects prepared by private consultant firms over a period of years. In one specific case their proposal to settle farm families on sixty-acre lots coincided exactly with a previous allotment to farm families made, within a matter of hours, by a knowledgeable campesino-leader (subsequently jailed). These families had invaded the public lands on which the project was later to be carried out and had then been dislodged from the premises by the force of arms. Here scientific research was used to bypass the excellent knowledge of farming conditions possessed by the farm people themselves, and until now almost no one has been settled on the project.
Another project has been the employment by the Alliance for Progress agencies of experts in irrigation and farm management who came all the way from Israel to solve Latin America's land problems. Freely supplied with Alliance funds, their apolitical approach -- they declined specifically to take an interest in the socioeconomic and political problems of land tenure in the areas in which they were working, as if the technical problems could be divorced from the politics of land tenure -- made their assistance and high expertise in technical matters a welcome part of the Counterreform.
A good approach, much in vogue in academic circles and closely related to the "technical reform" scheme, is the simplistic theory that development is a function of education ("the higher education, the higher individual incomes"). Give the peasants good education and training and they will progress! (Nothing is said about educating estate owners although they appear to need it more than the peasants.) This view, vigorously pushed by economists of the neoclassical school in U.S. midwestern universities, overlooks only a small detail: namely that the landed elite prevents the rural masses systematically from obtaining an education in order to keep them ignorant and poor, powerless and dependent. Their society has little room and no jobs for educated peasants.
"Technical reform" has ardent supporters among those who pretend that land reform lowers output and productivity.We discussed this myth in connection with land reform legislation in Latin America, but refer to it briefly once more since the thesis is also espoused with passionate insistence, [213] although with little valid evidence to back it up, by U.S. Counterreformists. Some academicians are enamored with it. Its protagonists go through the following mental processes: first, they minimize (not deny, because that would be openly antisocial) the importance of poverty and hunger, of inequality in the distribution of resources, incomes and political power in agriculture as being relatively immaterial in solving tbe "main" agricultural problem, which is production efficiency. Occasionally they put in a few good words for feudal agriculture with its antiquated production processes.34 Secondly, they maximize and glorify the significance of the handful of well-managed estates and in the same breath overlook that most estates are operated wastefully, at low levels of technology and management.35 Thirdly, they ignore the performance of Latin American agriculture as a whole. (According to the best available information it is just about the poorest in the world.) In other words, they pretend not to know that it would be difficult for Latin agriculture to do much worse than it is doing now. It practically can only go uphill except if the status quo persists. Evidence that land reform results in lowering output and efficiency is, conservatively speaking, extremely thin. In some countries less output was marketed at first because farm people, who were [214] near hunger levels before land reform, now consumed a larger portion at home. This is not the same as a decline in output. The three Latin American countries which really shook up their traditional land tenure structure prior to the Alliance for Progress are not-so-silent testimony that once the new tenure system is solidly established agricultural growth can be spectacular. Mexico is a classic example. From Bolivia comes solid proof that the Indians who were liberated by the land reform and occupied former latifundios, multiplied output rapidly there. Cuba's agriculture has grown rapidly and diversified and even increases productivity on its sugarcane plantations. (In Chile, recent expropriations and redistributions of poorly managed estates -- although far from being a land reform -- showed similar results.) The experience in non-Latin American countries with real land reforms has been similar. The thesis that land reform lowers output is a historical falsehood no matter how often it is repeated, and must be discarded as a serious Counterreform argument.
"Technical reform" and other devices to create false problems or delay land reform would have gained less prominence if there had been integrity and courage in upholding the meaning of land reform defined in the Charter as the large-scale replacement of latifundios and their redistribution to the peasants. This should have settled the matter for the time being as far as U.S. development policy was concerned, signed and sealed as the Charter was. Instead, its meaning was progressively obscured in subsequent years under the very government which had been a party to the international agreement. In retrospect it now seems that there was a deliberate, subtle campaign to talk land reform to death; to take the steam out of the progressive dogma of the Charter; to shift attention from the main to marginal aspects; to belittle the real issues or put them in a false light.36 (All great social and [215] political issues create controversy and land reform is no exception. Its complexities are not being underestimated here. But in this case we are faced not with a mere public discussion of an important issue but with a broadside attack against a policy adopted by the nation.) It was almost like a Madison Avenue job -- like a full-fledged publicity campaign to peddle a product by glorifying its package rather than its merits to mislead the public into buying it. Facts were suppressed and puny achievements of Latin American reforms magnified to give the impression that great things were happening on the continent under Alliance auspices when the situation was, at least in many important regions, deteriorating. National and international conferences and seminars were organized to discuss land reform even under the auspices of groups who, with their close connection with the landed oligarchy in the Americas, could never be accused of having the slightest interest in an effective transformation of the agrarian structure. Everybody talked about land reform and gave it his own interpretation.
A popular mechanism is to confound colonization with land reform.37 Since there is so much unoccupied land on the continent -- so the reasoning goes -- why not settle all these
[216] millions of peasants there and leave unmolested the few estate owners who spent generations in developing their farm enterprises (shedding a tear for the landed oligarchy)? Again the argument seems plausible, but is treacherous. (No one has ever made a counterproposal for shipping estate owners to the uninhabited frontier although with their accumulated capital reserves they could be expected with reasonable logic to be able to develop these unused resources much faster and cheaper than the poor peasants. After all, they claim that they possess all the management talent anyway.) The proposal implies uprooting peasants from their communities to which they have belonged for generations and which in fact they constitute; forcing them to relinquish any and all demands on land on or near which they have been raised; establishing them in areas of unhealthy climate, without any (or only scattered) roads, schools, hospitals, business establishments or doctors, no less subject to exploitation by the oligarchy than formerly -- all for the benefit of a few owners who often had gained from these peasants possession of their land by force or guile. Colonization schemes are essentially Counterreformist when proposed as an alternative to land reform or as a major development policy for agriculture.
The argument was closely followed by attempts to execute it. Fortunately the implementation of large colonization schemes is extremely difficult on political and social grounds, and very costly. In fact, if executed on a mass scale it would even deprive the oligarchy of its main element of survival, a cheap labor force. But emphasis on colonization, in theory and in practice, achieved what it intended: divert attention from land reform and confuse it with it. Today land reform institutes and other government agencies are engaged in a few such schemes, with or without foreign financial assistance, and since most of the colonization schemes end in failure, a great [217] deal of public money is squandered without criticism. Colonization schemes are the tranquilizers of the landed elite and Counterreformists in the Americas. In contrast, expropriations of latifundios for real land reform, are about as scarce as skeletons of the Neanderthal period.
If colonization is land reform, it becomes relatively easy to magnify tiny reform achievements by adding the campesinos settled in colonization schemes and even perhaps all those who settle spontaneously in the frontier trying to escape miserable conditions in the home community. Only intelligent observers will notice that the agrarian structure has remained unchanged, and of course the peasants themselves. This trick has been used with success in the U.S. and in Latin America, with Colombia taking the lead and devoting a fair share of its resources on publicity campaigns about its "achievements." The same occurs with the issuance of titles. There are positively hundreds of thousands of smallholders throughout Latin America who cultivate a piece of land without proper title. They are not seeking to live dangerously! Lack of interest of their governments or their incapacity to control the land situation, and the action of the landed elite force them into this status of precariousness and insecurity. Lack of titles is assumed to be a real problem in Latin America, but it is of course not for the estate owners. It allows them to force smallholders off the land with complete impunity. Insecurity of peasants is part and parcel of a latifundio agriculture, and the absence of titles is only one expression of it. Even if peasants without titles were all to receive their documents of property, it would hardly change the agrarian structure. The titles have their merits, but they neither add nor detract meaningfully from the land monopoly or the political power of the landed elite. Still the distribution of titles is falsely counted as a land reform activity. It pacifies the Counterreformists when they can enumerate millions of campesinos as beneficiaries of land reform and mislead the public on the agrarian changes in the hemisphere. Take the following quotation from an attractive publication, entitled The Role of Agrarian Reform in Latin American Progress, issued by the U.S. Department of State in July 1968, in which the deputy [218] U.S. Coordinator for the Alliance of Progress proclaimed that
some 700,000 families in Latin America have been settled or resettled [sic] on their own land since the Alliance for Progress was conceived in 1961. Some 450,000 families have received title to land. A total of 3.6 million people have benefited from settlement and resettlement programs.Here, land reform, settlement, resettlement, titles and perhaps a few other activities not specifically mentioned are all lumped together in an unbelievable statistic, mongrel child of alchemy and fantasy, in order to hide the fact that land reform in the Americas has been an undeniable failure.The first official break with the Charter dogma came with a novel idea presented by the U.S. representative in the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress (CIAP) who was then W. W. Rostow. It was a Counterreform idea par excellence. He tried to replace the clear language of the Charter with regard to unjust land tenure systems by vague and meaningless references to "modernizing rural life." Terms such as land reform or unjust social conditions were omitted. Instead in what amounted almost to a policy directive, emphasis was placed on modernizing "marketing arrangements and institutions" -- rather than land tenure institutions -- and in a new document issued at the Meeting of American Chiefs of State, at Punta del Este in 1967, called Declaration of the Presidents of America, land reform was abandoned with a sigh of relief (not in law since the 1961 Charter is still in force, but in practice) and replaced by an entirely new policy for economic and social development for the Latin American nations, the Latin American Common Market. It amounted to a complete reversal of official policy which now deals principally with the growth of the industrial and commercial sectors and engages in improving relatively marginal matters such as tariffs, or custom duties, the standardization of products or the allocation of markets in which Latin America's campesinos have little, if any, interest and from which they would in all likelihood receive no benefits whatever. The common market can be implemented without [219] major political controversy, now that it has received the blessing of the U.S. which sees in it a mechanism to increase its control over Latin American economies. For all practical purposes then, land reform is a dead issue -- at least for the time being.38
What then is the ultimate source of power of the landed elite in Latin America which enables it today to repress the campesinos with brutal efficiency? Could the landed elite maintain, with only the resources of their countries at their disposal, a society which is good only to them? It is now apparent that the reforms which are urgently needed throughout the hemisphere have been staved off with the help of policies pursued by the U.S. which were clearly Counterreformist and coincide, as we have seen, with the policies and wishes of the landed elite and reinforced them. To the civilian efforts under the prostituted Alliance for Progress must be added military and paramilitary assistance. (Maybe this was implied in the statement of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs when he said: ". . . we must conceive of the Alliance as a union for total development, and not allow ourselves to think of it merely in terms of economic goals."39) It is now apparent from the detailed testimony received in 1967 and 1968 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and from other sources that Latin American nations have received just enough, and probably more than enough, weapons and other arms assistance [220] to aid Latin American governments to repress with finality any movements in favor of reforms.40 The Mexican economist Edmundo Flores who specializes in problems of economic development expresses it this way:
There were no more Cubas in Latin America (though there was the Dominican mess). But this success was not achieved, as it was in the case of the Marshall Plan, by development, by an increase in employment levels and the standard of living, or by influence which made people turn from communism to some other form of social organization. It was achieved because implementation of the economic goals of the Alliance was aided by a military arm which was responsible for repressing sedition and revolution regardless of cost. If we are going to talk about the success or failure of the Alliance, we have to take into consideration the policies followed by the Pentagon, the RAND Corporation, the C.I.A., and other agencies that have been very active and effective during recent years in Latin America.41The important question is of course not whether, from the point of view of the U.S. or that of the Latin American governments, this aid has been large or small. Aid was given principally to maintain internal security and combat the impact of the Cuban revolution. The important question is whether this aid has succeeded in achieving or preserving the superiority of the landed elite and its allies which is necessary to maintain the status quo. A good working hypothesis is that, without the U.S., the landed oligarchy would have been unable to withstand the demands of the peasantry for more land, a much greater share of the national income, more social justice and greater political power, and might well have been swept away, as in Cuba, from the rural sector in several or all countries. With an equal degree of realism we can hypothesize that U.S. policy and aid has tipped the balance [221] in favor of the landed elite. Limiting ourselves to the preservation of the status quo in agriculture, it is obvious that with large masses of mostly unorganized and unarmed (or at best poorly armed) peasants, landed-elite superiority is easily and cheaply attained. A few modern weapons -- helicopters, napalm -- can easily help to re-establish the disequilibrium balance which peasant discontent threatens to upset.In reality U.S. military and paramilitary assistance has been both indirect, through the sale of weapons, the training of police and counter-insurgency forces and intelligence reports on peasant movements; or direct, with direct participation of U.S. personnel. The former is part of a permanent program; the latter occurs sporadically such as the intervention in the Dominican Republic, or the reported use of American pilots and weapons to fight the great peasant uprisings in Peru in the early 1960's.
The Alliance for Progress aroused great expectations that the U.S. would take the leadership and use its great influence to improve economic and social conditions throughout Latin American agriculture. These expectations have been unfulfilled. Some people argue that Americans are against land reform because some U.S. investors in farm land might be expropriated with the rest of them.42 One expert put it as follows: [222]
I do not see how we can possibly convince Latin American governments that we are serious about supporting their internal reforms if we turn around and say, "But if you touch any U.S. holdings here, we are not going to give you any aid. We are going to suspend aid just like that." It just does not seem to me that this makes any sense. . . nearly every time we come up against a truly progressive government we simply label it as confiscatory and come just short of sending the marines to protect what we see as U.S. interests. We tend to equate a few private U.S. interests with the overall national interest in these countries. . . .43(What gives the quoted argument still greater significance are persistent reports that U.S. investors are systematically buying up large tracts of land in Brazil and elsewhere, perhaps in an unconscious Counterreform move to make land reform impracticable for a few more years.) Perhaps the statement is too narrow. The great Counterreform in the U.S. concerns also American industrial and commercial firms (some of them engaged in buying up and processing large proportions[223] of agricultural export products) who have no or only little investments in farm real estate but who have a much higher stake in the preservation of the rural status quo and that of the marketing and export channels than mere landowners. They also "equate their private interests with the overall national interests in these countries." United States investors and businessmen with real-estate, commercial or industrial interests in Latin America cannot be expected to relinquish their holdings any more than Latin American estate owners and will fight to the bitter finish to preserve them. Only this can explain why so many resources were put behind the great Counterreform of the 1960's, why so little was and is heard about American support for land reform in Latin America, and why it was decided to resolve the reform issues by military means. It would take a considerable reform in U.S. national policies to allow land reforms in Latin America and at the same time force U.S. business to accept the consequences. The truth seems to be that land reform in Latin America threatens the whole infra- and supra-structure of American economic hegemony in the hemisphere.
To us all this looks like a shortsighted view. But history is made up of policies and programs and activities of shortsighted people. The shame is that, with the help of the "U.S., the way it looks now, the campesinos of Latin America can anticipate another generation of violence, deprivation, hunger and repression.