Published in Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America, edited by Rodolfo Stavenhagen, 1970.
1 This happened for example in Russia after the revolution of 1905, according to G. Tanquary Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), chapters X-XII. It has also been happening in Mexico in more or less overt fashion since 1940.
Notes 2 For some landlords, reform is electrification of the countryside, or more financial aid for themselves. Some even have looked forward to land reform, they say, because they have hopes that it would bring more industry to their part of the country!
3 Lack of experience is not one of the reasons for the low quality of the land reform laws. Brazil has a history of many dozens of land reform bills. In Chile, the Christian Democratic party prepared a short, concise bill in 1962, but when in power a few years later, sponsored a complicated, lengthy bill which was passed and is now in effect and is difficult to apply.
4 At times, the argument is heard that governments willing to apply the laws to the limit could in effect bring about a substantial reform in the existing agrarian structures. This argument cannot easily be brushed aside. But there is no experience to prove or disprove it. So far there has been little difference between the type of government responsible for the "land reform" legislation with its built-in Counterreform and that which is responsible for implementing it. In other words, no government has as yet shown a willingness to apply the law and land reform to the limit.
The poor legal techniques and the fact that provisions are susceptible to more than one interpretation have of course one advantage: namely that a government willing to go to the limit could always interpret the legislation in favor of the campesinos and against the landlords where possible -- if it can count on the courts to support it. The only alternative would be to coerce the courts into supporting it -- but a government willing to go to that extreme does not need to feel bound to the legislation in the first place.
5 The role of the Alliance for Progress will be described later.
6 In a few instances, land reform legislation was established by presidential decree.
7 This feature is related, of course, to others, like the complicated and time-consuming land distribution and settlement processes of peasants which require, by law and with the policies adopted by the reform institutes, much time, effort and manpower resources. These details cannot be analyzed here, but they are evidence that the lawmakers were thinking at best of a slow, piecemeal process of adjustments in the tenure structure, taking generations to accomplish, not a massive land reform.
8 Reference is made here to the lack of new capital investments -- not the accretion in the value of the land which is the result ot increasing scarcity of land, population pressure and inflation.
9 This particular law does not give any guidelines to the land reform institute with respect to the interpretation of this nebulous clause. Presumably the agency can interpret it as it sees fit. However, landlords could no doubt object on good legal grounds to expropriation of privately owned land by pointing to large areas of unsettled frontier lands available for "land reform" and distribution to the peasants.
10 It is extremely important to note that lately the Counterreformists argue that the obvious failure of land reform in the Americas is evidence that land reform is an inadequate mechanism to resolve the problems of agriculture. This Machiavellian argument is often presented in documents which attempt to show that if only more estate owners would improve their farm management and technological levels, and if more inputs would be put at their disposal, there would be nothing to worry about in the future. Obviously no mention is made that land reform has been sabotaged, nor of the disastrous consequences for the peasantry of the introduction of modern innovations, such as labor-saving devices, or modern methods of labor management.
In this context, it is also interesting to note that many Counterreformists argue that "land reform" would only create more minifundios. Clearly, this argument is malicious, but it reflects precisely the realities of rural life in Latin America where "land reform" is carried out by the landed elite itself. A real land reform would attempt to do away with minifundios (although it may be unable to solve the minifundio problem entirely because of its magnitude, at least in the foreseeable future), not only by giving land in adequate quantities to peasant families and helping them with credit, better marketing methods, etc., but also by organizing large-scale cooperative or collective farm units. But land reform in the Latin American nations of the 1960's may actually end up by creating more minifundios: since only little land is available for land reform under the existing land reform legislation, the institutes tend to cram as many farm families on privately owned plots in their "land reform" projects as possible. In many cases, these projects are doomed from the very start for a variety of reasons: high initial indebtedness (since the settlers have to pay for the land); poor soils; a market structure inimical to small producers; and others.
11 The specific provision referred to treats an incorporated estate as several farms in accordance with the number of stockholders and the quantity of shares they hold. Since under the law each "farm owner" can claim a portion of the "farm" for himself, the total expropriable land is sharply reduced and can even be equal to zero. Or the expropriation procedure becomes unmanageably complex.
12 Another way of putting the same argument is the following (a quote from a recent speech by a high United States official): "An intelligent agrarian reform program does not mean the wholesale expropriation of large private farms [in Latin America] without regard to their efficiency. Quite the contrary, it means the expropriation and distribution only of those lands which are not being farmed at all or which are being farmed inefficiently."
It is exactly this argument which plays into the hands of the landed elite. If a farm is "not being farmed at all," for example, what would prevent a landlord from investing a few dollars, and putting some cattle on his land and taking it out of the land reform program?
13 The conditions under which the land is ceded enable the peasants at best to produce food for themselves and their family. In most cases the plots are a liability for the peasants. The soils are exhausted and the owners do not give time and facilities to cultivate them, nor does anyone else. The plot mostly provides a place to live.
14 Colombia now has a similar antisocial measure on a large scale "in the name of land reform." Under the conditions under which it can be implemented, it can only be very harmful to the peasants. Ecuador's land reform decree (1964) provided that small tenant farmers who own plantations and other improvements on land belonging to estate owners may request expropriation after four years following the enactment of the decree. This allows ample time for the owners to take countermeasures to rid the land of the tenants, as it was done in Peru. If this legislation had been serious, it would have declared that such tenants become owners at the moment the decree is signed.
15 This policy does not threaten their sources of labor supply given the large amount of unemployment in rural communities.
16 We are omitting references to the large land reforms of Guatemala (100,000 peasants became beneficiaries there in a little over a year but were deprived of their plots again after the fall of the Arbenz government) and Bolivia. Both occurred prior to the Alliance for Progress.
17 Statistics on "land reform" achievements are practically unobtainable. Most land reform institutes publish data in which land reform achievements per se (i.e., the redistribution of expropriated estates), colonization, legalization of invasions by farm people of private or public lands, the issuance of property titles and other activities are hopelessly mixed up to confuse the public. In most countries, the number of beneficiaries of real land reform amount to a few hundred annually at best. In some countries they are near zero; in a few exceptional cases, they amount to a few thousand during the first few years of the life of the land reform laws and institutes. In Brazil only about 330 families were given land since 1964 -- but not all on former private estates. In Colombia, which set in motion a costly propaganda machine to make it believed that it was undertaking land reform, the institute acquired 2.3 million hectares, but of this 2 million were acquired under an old (1936) law which entitled the government to recuperate privately owned, unused land, and only about 44,000 hectares were "expropriated," presumably from private estate owners. None of the figures published indicate whether all this "acquired" land was actually turned over to farm people and how many farm families were benefited. Obviously Colombia's is a tiny "reform."
The mere statistics do not tell the whole story. Usually, "land reform" beneficiaries are given land on second- or third-rate soils in hinterland areas. Hence none of the Latin American nations, except Cuba, Bolivia, and Mexico, have come anywhere near a real land reform.
18 The Venezuelan reform also began before the Alliance for Progress. But the Venezuelan claim that well over 100,000 peasants Were settled under its land reform program seems to be unjustified according to the latest information.
19 We are not overlooking that the institute directors are appointees of the political party in power. The political constellation in Latin America in the 1960's is such, however, that the party in power usually represents the landed elite, no matter what its name.
20 To this must be added that the laws which specify the sources of funds to which the institutes are entitled have consistently tailored the institutes' resources to a tiny land reform program and not to a massive "effective transformation of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use." The budgetary provisions of the laws reflect best the unbridgeable gap between real land reform needs and the legislators' concept of them.
21 The estate was expropriated after having been invaded by Indian communities prior to the land reform law and the project was subsequently taken over by the reform institute.
22 In Colombia, for instance, the institute argued in one of its own annual reports that the land tenure problem was not the existence of latifundios, but that of small holdings. It does not take a convinced reformer to know that the smallholders' problem in Latin America is the result of the airtight control of the landed elite over the land.
23 The London Economist reported recently that in Peru the institute agronomists refuse to ride in rural buses because they are usually packed with Indians.
24 Peasant violence is not an invention of the 1960's. It occurred sporadically throughout recent Latin American history, mostly because of the way in which estate owners obtained much of their land -- i.e. by robbing communities and individual peasants.
25 Asociaciones Agropecuarias Americanos Amigas, with headquarters in Chicago, according to one source.
26 Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti, Paraguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras. Since writing the above, two more countries, Peru and Panama, have been added to the list.
27 Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic. But see preceding footnote.
28 Costa Rica, Uruguay, Panama, Colombia and Chile. But see footnote 26. The term "non-political military establishments" is perhaps a misnomer. In 1968, the National Guard of Panama took an active part in protecting a president impeached by parliament and a few months later deposed an elected president. In Colombia, the army is engaged in fighting rural subversives and in sporadic guerrilla warfare. Both activities are political by any definition.
29 Edwin Lieuwen's The Latin American Military (Survey of the Alliance for Progress, A Study prepared at the Request of the Sub-Committee of American Republics Affairs of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Washington, D.C., 1967).
30 The text of the relevant passage of the Charter has been reprinted earlier.
31 In subsequent years it proved easier to discourage, and even effectively prevent, Latin American governments from undertaking reforms than to encourage them. With existing conditions, the mechanism provided by the Alliance operated in reality in reverse and encouragement was given to countries for not carrying out reforms.
32 W. Thiesenhusen and M. Brown: "If we [the United States] actually wish to see reform brought about, we will have no choice but to support governments that on occasion embarrass U.S. Officials." They claim that many officials lack enthusiasm about land reform because they don't like to see property rights disturbed. (In Problems of Agriculture, Survey of the Alliance for Progress, op. cit., December 22, 1967, pp. 17 f.)
33 A splendid example is Latin American Agricultural Development and Policies (International Studies in Economics, Monograph No. 8, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames, September 1968), a collection of essays in which the use of the term "land reform" is studiously avoided. Apparently the authors take the view that by sticking to productivity, sharpening priorities, investing in farm people, improved marketing systems and similar noncontroversial concepts, ugly specters like rural poverty, social injustices or rural violence and their impact on the performance of agriculture will evaporate. Among nine proposals, introduced as suggestions for improving agriculture, "raising productivity" is mentioned in first place and land reform not at all. At this point the economists trying to look like objective scientists simply appear to be Innocents Abroad.
Of course Monograph No. 8 is anything but innocent. It excludes land reform from its policy proposals because in the brief references it makes to this controversial and nasty subject, it presents land reform as a complete failure ("land reform is bad for the peasants") without of course explaining the reasons for the failure. This attitude reminds one of the story of the man who pushes his mother-in-law downstairs and then inquires: "Mother, why do you run so fast?"
34 One professor in the United States who carries some weight in his profession (agricultural economics) said textually that feudalistic traditions in Brazil are probably a net social advantage so long as Brazil is so short of adequate nonfarm-job opportunities, although probably at the expense of achieving maximum operator-family incomes [as though the latter was relevant under the circumstances]; that Brazil owes a substantial debt to those landowners who are active in settling, developing and improving the nation's agricultural resources; that agrarian reform will do the nation a disservice if it fails to protect those large landholders who are performing this essential role; and that agrarian reform should begin with a drastic reconstruction and far better financing of its Ministry of Agriculture! (W. H. Nichols and R. Miller Paiva, "The Structure and Productivity of Brazilian Agriculture," Journal of Farm Economics, May 1965.) In Europe, views such as these were considered outmoded at the time of the French Revolution.
35 Farming is of course not an unprofitable business for most estate owners. Farm prices are by and large favorable, costs low, and real-estate values continue to climb, providing windfall gains for the owners.
36 Take a recent publication by a United States agency, devoted to Brazil. It stated that "land in small holdings increased most rapidly [since 1940]." The implication is that small producers gained more land than large producers. The statement is misleading because of the time period used and indefensible because it ignores facts which the agency ought to have known and used. According to the preliminary census of 1960 the number of small holdings increased very sharply, but land in these holdings only slightly since 1950. Large estates gained control of the lion's share of the new farm land added since 1950. Undeniably latifundismo was rapidly increasing. Then came the military coup and the final census. All data had been "revised" in such a way that large farms counted with about the same or less land than in 1950 (depending on the size group)! Now latifundismo had been losing ground! Throughout Latin America, censuses under-report the amount of land in large estates, but this seems to be a more violent case of data manipulation. (Quote from Brazil's Position in World Agricultural Trade, United States Department of Agriculture, E.R.S., Foreign 190, Washington, D.C., October 1967, p. 23.)
37 Other devices are: (1) recommending birth control; (2) encouraging rural-urban migration and industrialization as a solution to the agricultural problem; (3) decentralizing government agencies and programs; (4) recommending increased taxation. The first is recommended on the assumption that there are too many people in Latin America, although the average land-per-man ratio is amazingly high. The last is the favorite theme of United States bureaucrats. They argue that landowners who do not exploit their farm will sell out rather than pay taxes and leave the land to the peasants. As a result, the agrarian structure will be changed. This is of course nothing but wishful thinking. The landed elite which controls parliaments will not tax themselves out of business. Some argue too that more taxes will increase output, but this would reverse historical processes!
38 The new document does contain a reference to agriculture. It reads as follows:
"The living conditions of the rural workers and farmers of Latin America will be transformed, to guarantee their full participation in economic and social progress. For that purpose, integrated programs of modernization, land settlement and agrarian reform will be carried out as the countries so require. Similarly, productivity will be improved and agricultural production diversified. Furthermore, recognizing that the Continent's capacity for food production entails a dual responsibility [sic], a special effort will be made to produce sufficient food for the growing needs of their [sic] own peoples and to contribute toward feeding the peoples of other regions."Rostow's novel concept on rural development had won out, as this paragraph, undoubtedly written in great haste, demonstrates.
39 Survey of the Alliance for Progress. Op. cit., Hearings of February 27-29, March 1-6, 1968, Washington, D.C., 1968, p. 231.
40 To this must be added the attacks on the autonomy of Latin American universities which have long given intellectual support to institutional reforms in and outside of agriculture.
41 "The Alliance for Progress and the Mexican Revolution," in R. E. Zelder, ed., Key Factors in Economic Growth, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Michigan Business Paper No. 48), p. 59.
42 It is surprising that United States opposition to land reform exists irrespective of whether expropriation of farm land is made with or without compensation. The Alliance, which attempted to channel land reform into peaceful and legal procedures, was of course thinking of the "replacement of latifundios" by paying their owners for the value of their estates. Hence one could, at first glance, expect that United States business would be in favor of a land reform of this type. But the problem is of course much more complex. No Latin American country can afford to pay estate owners the full value of their land and still carry out a real land reform, in fact not even a mild reform. Nor can they discriminate, for ethical and political reasons, between foreigners and nationals by paying the former more than the latter. United States investors in farm land, like Latin owners, believe that they are entitled to receive an expropriation price equivalent to the full market value of their property (i.e. a price determined for all practical purposes by them, since there is no real market for estates) and they would oppose any other arrangement, although they are probably not so naive as to believe that this is a realistic possibility. In Cuba, the government offered to pay foreign landowners, but United States investors did not accept.
Whether or not to compensate owners for their land which in many instances they have acquired illegally is of course a highly debatable issue. Many land reformers would vote for expropriating estates without any compensation whatever (on grounds of social justice as well as for economic reasons, because compensation maintains economic injustices), although they might not be too strenuously hostile to an expropriation at the declared tax value which is in all cases ridiculously low and which has allowed estate owners for generations to evade paying taxes.
Under the circumstances which prevail in Latin American agriculture, a peaceful, legal land reform, based on compensation, has practically always a built-in Counterreform element: Latin American nations cannot afford it and the United States or United States-financed international lending agencies cannot lend them the money (on legal grounds) to assist them financially to expropriate with compensation.
The element of compensation is of course not the determining factor as far as opposition to land reform is concerned, whereas the political element -- the subversion of the status quo -- is.
43 Marion Brown, in Survey of the Alliance for Progress, Heatings, op. cit., p. 53.