Franklin W. Knight

Before the late 1960s, agrarian reform was regarded as the panacea to rectify more than 500 years of social and economic injustice across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Political manifestos from Mexico to Argentina advocated the dismantling of the large landed estates called latifundia, and the creation of small landholding communities that would, as the Mexican Revolution of 1910 expressed it, "provide both land and liberty" to the majority of the population.

The first practical example of land reform occurred in Haiti, where the large sugar estates were destroyed during the revolution and the land distributed to small farmers after 1804. It was less a planned governmental action than a spontaneous reaction to the French attempt to re-conquer the colony and re-impose slavery. Minifundism or ownership of small parcels of land became the pattern of landholding in 19th century Haiti. By 1883 more than 80 per cent of all rural families owned some land in Haiti, creating the most thoroughly peasant-based economy anywhere in the Americas.

The feverish recent inspiration for land reform, however, goes back to the great Mexican Revolution of 1910 -1917. At the end of that bloody struggle, the victors under interim president Venustiano Carranza wrote a constitution that invested ultimate sovereignty in the entity of the state. Part of the new obligation of this entity was the protection of citizens' rights and the establishment of a just society. This just society required that every head of household be given a plot of land. In such a way, it was piously presumed, ancient injustices could be suddenly rectified.

Translating hopeful words to concrete deeds proved difficult. In the mid-1930s President Lázaro Cárdenas made a bold attempt. He created the ejido, a communal and individual system of land distribution that ignited great expectations among landless Mexicans and aroused resentful concern among the landed elite. In six years the Cárdenas government distributed nearly 50 million acres of land, more than the combined distributions of its six predecessors. By 1940 one-third of the Mexican population had received land under the revolutionary agrarian reform programme. And periodic land distributions continue to be a feature of populist politics in Mexico.

The economic results of the Mexican agrarian experiment were mixed. In some areas such as the fertile La Laguna region straddling the borders of the provinces of Coahuila and Durango, the newly created cooperatives flourished. But overall the reform failed to boost agricultural production, especially in the important export sector. Rapid population increase also wiped out the gains in landholding as well as the ability of the distributed land to support ever expanding family sizes before 1970. In any case there was not enough land for the landless. Nevertheless, by 1980 about 50 per cent of all rural families in Mexico benefited from some form of land distribution. As a political and social act the ejido was an unqualified success.

By the 1950s just about every state throughout Latin America and the Caribbean wanted to have a Mexican-style agrarian reform. Indeed, between 1940 and 1980, 18 Latin American countries engaged in some form of agrarian reform. They included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Usually land was distributed in three ways. The most popular form was the individual grant to a family. Another way was the creation of collective or cooperative farms. The third option, as in Sandinista Nicaragua and Castro's Cuba, created large state-owned land systems. Nevertheless, all three forms were commonly employed across the Americas.
The degree of success varied.

The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 embarked on a massive land redistribution project that operated in fits and starts but eventually benefited some 78 per cent of rural Bolivian families. Unfortunately, successive Bolivian governments have signally failed either to resolve the land problem issues or to make significant inroads in general poverty and inequality in the state.

Chile and Venezuela implemented land distribution programmes in the 1960s. Peru initiated a programme in the early 1970s. Between 1970 and 1973 President Salvador Allende expanded the Chilean programme but the military government that overthrew him revoked his programme. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas expropriated some large landholdings after 1979 and turned them into collective farms that gradually reverted to private holdings, some in the hands of former government administrators as well as opponents of the socialist-style government.

The most extensive programme occurred in Cuba after the Castro Revolution of 1959. The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) initiated a programme that brought the vast majority of Cuban lands under the control and administration of the national government. The INRA economic record is no better than any other in the hemisphere.

Some reforms were not serious attempts to address the rural problem. Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Panama and Uruguay initiated systems that affected less than five per cent of rural families and were designed more for publicity than genuinely reformist purposes.

The dismal record of land reform in the Americas clearly indicates that the problem is quite complex. Reform is more than mere land distribution; and land distribution neither reduces inequality nor poverty. As a strategy of economic development it is best combined with other measures. The fact that Latin America is the most urbanised region of the world also means that the significance of landholding has changed considerably during the last century.

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