Land reforms by country

Agrarian reform and land reform have been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history. They are often highly political and have been achieved (or attempted) in many countries.

Latin America

Brazil

Getúlio Vargas, who rose to presidency in Brazil following the Brazilian Revolution of 1930, promised a land reform but reneged on his promise.

A first attempt to make a nationwide reform was set up in the government of José Sarney (1985–1990) as a result of the strong popular movement that had contributed to the fall of the military government. According to the 1988 Constitution of Brazil, the government is required to "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function" (Article 184). However, the "social function" mentioned there is not well defined, and hence the so-called First Land Reform National Plan never was put into action.

Bolivia

Land in Bolivia was unequally distributed – 92% of the cultivable land was held by large estates – until the Bolivian national revolution in 1952. Then, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement government abolished forced peasantry labor and established a program of expropriation and distribution of the rural property of the traditional landlords to the indigenous peasants. A unique feature of the reform in Bolivia was the organization of peasants into syndicates. Peasants were not only granted land but their militias also were given large supplies of arms. The peasants remained a powerful political force in Bolivia during all subsequent governments. By 1970, 45% of peasant families had received title to land. Land reform projects continued in the 1970s and 1980s. A 1996 agrarian reform law increased protection for smallholdings and indigenous territories, but also protected absentee landholders who pay taxes from expropriation. Reforms were continued at 2006, with the Bolivian senate passing a bill authorizing the government redistribution of land among the nation's mostly indigenous poor.

Chile

Attempts at land reform began under the government of Jorge Alessandri in 1960, were accelerated during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), and reached its climax during the 1970-1973 presidency of Salvador Allende. Farms of more than were expropriated. After the 1973 coup the process was halted by the military junta and – up to a point – reversed by the market forces.

Colombia

Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934–1938) passed Law 200 of 1936, which allowed for the expropriation of private properties, in order to promote "social interest".

Later attempts declined, until the National Front presidencies of Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958–1962) and Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966–1970), which respectively created the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA) and further developed land entitlement. In 1968 and 1969 alone, the INCORA issued more than 60,000 land titles to farmers and workers.

Despite this, the process was then halted and the situation began to reverse itself, as the subsequent violent actions of drug lords, paramilitaries, guerrillas and opportunistic large landowners severely contributed to a renewed concentration of land and to the displacement of small landowners.

In the early 21st century, tentative government plans to use the land legally expropriated from drug lords and/or the properties given back by demobilized paramilitary groups have not caused much practical improvement yet.

Cuba

Land reform was among the chief planks of the revolutionary platform of 1959. Almost all large holdings were seized by the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA), which dealt with all areas of agricultural policy. A ceiling of 166 acres (67 hectares) was established, and tenants were given ownership rights, though these rights are constrained by government production quotas and a prohibition of real estate transactions.

Guatemala

Land reform occurred during the " Ten Years of Spring" (1944–1954) under the governments of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz, after a popular revolution forced out dictator Jorge Ubico. The largest part of the reform was the law officially called Decree 900, which redistributed all uncultivated land from landholdings that were larger than . If the estates were between and in size, uncultivated land was expropriated only if less than two-thirds of it was in use. The law benefited 500,000 people, or one-sixth of the Guatemalan Population. Historians have called this reform as one of the most successful land reforms in history. However, the United Fruit Company felt threatened by the law and lobbied the United States government, which was a factor in the US-backed coup that deposed Árbenz in 1954. The majority of the reform was rolled back by the US supported military dictatorship that followed.

Mexico

In 1856, the first land reform was driven by the (the Lerdo law), enacted by the Liberal Party government of the Second Federal Republic of Mexico. One of the aims of the reform government was to develop the economy by returning to productive cultivation the underutilized lands of the Roman Catholic Church and the municipal communities (Indian commons), which required the division of these lands for sale, with the expectation that Mexico would develop a class of small owners. This was to be accomplished through the provisions of Ley Lerdo that prohibited ownership of land by the Church and the municipalities. The reform government also financed its war effort by seizing and selling church property and other large estates. Little land was acquired by individual small holders. After the war, the role of the state in land policy expanded during the presidency of Porfirio Diaz. The aim was to extinguish traditional subsistence farming and make agriculture in Mexico a dynamic commercial sector as part of Mexico's modernization. Land was concentrated in the hands of large-scale owners, a great many of them foreigners, leaving peasantry, the largest sector of the Mexican population, landless. Peasant unrest was a major cause of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. A certain degree of land reform was introduced, albeit unevenly, as part of the Mexican Revolution.

In 1934, president Lázaro Cárdenas passed the 1934 Agrarian Code and accelerated the pace of land reform. He helped redistribute of land, of which were expropriated from American owned agricultural property. This caused conflict between Mexico and the United States. Agrarian reform had come close to extinction in the early 1930s. The first few years of the Cárdenas's reform were marked by high food prices, falling wages, high inflation, and low agricultural yields. In 1935 land reform began sweeping across the country in the periphery and core of commercial agriculture. The Cárdenas alliance with peasant groups was awarded by the destruction of the hacienda system. Cárdenas distributed more land than all his revolutionary predecessors put together, a 400% increase. The land reform justified itself in terms of productivity; average agricultural production during the three-year period from 1939 to 1941 was higher than it had been at any time since the beginning of the revolution.

Starting with the government of Miguel Alemán (1946–52), land reform steps made in previous governments were rolled back. Alemán's government allowed capitalist entrepreneurs to rent peasant land. This created phenomenon known as neolatifundismo, where land owners build up large-scale private farms on the basis of controlling land which remains ejidal but is not sown by the peasants to whom it is assigned.

In 1970, President Luis Echeverría began his term by declaring land reform dead. In the face of peasant revolt, he was forced to backtrack, and embarked on the biggest land reform program since Cárdenas. Echeverría legalized take-overs of huge foreign-owned private farms, which were turned into new collective ejidos.

In 1988, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was elected. In December 1991, he amended Article 27 of the Constitution, making it legal to sell land and allow peasants to put up their land as collateral for a loan.

Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata were strongly identified with land reform, as are the present-day (as of 2006) Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Today, most Mexican peasants are landowners. However, their holdings are usually too small, and farmers must supplement their incomes by working for the remaining landlords, and/or traveling to the United States.

See also: México Indígena (2005-2008 project)

Nicaragua

During and after the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979), the Sandinista government officially announced their political platform which included land reform.

The last months of Sandinista rule were criticized for the Piñata Plan, which distributed large tracts of land to prominent Sandinistas. After their loss in the 1990 elections, most of the Sandinista leaders held most of the private property and businesses that had been confiscated and nationalized by the FSLN government. This process became known as the and was tolerated by the new government of Violeta Chamorro.

Peru

Land reform in the 1950s largely eliminated a centuries-old system of debt peonage.

Further land reform occurred after the 1968 coup by left-wing colonel Juan Velasco Alvarado. The military dictatorship under General Velasco (1968–75) launched a large-scale agrarian reform movement that attempted to redistribute land, hoping to break Peru's traditionally inequitable pattern of land holding and the hold of traditional oligarchy. The model used by Velasco to bring about change was the associative enterprise, in which former salaried rural workers and independent peasant families would become members of different kinds of cooperatives.Hunefeldt, C. A Brief History of Peru. New York, NY About 22 million acres were redistributed, more land than in any reform program outside of Cuba. Unfortunately, productivity suffered as peasants with no management experience took control. The military government continued to spend huge amounts of money to transform Peru's agriculture to socialized ownership and management. These state expenditures are to blame for the enormous increase in Peru's external debt at the beginning of the 1970s. State bankruptcy was partly caused by the cheap credit the government extended to promote agrarian development, state subsidies, and administrative expenditures to carry out the agrarian reform during this period. The more radical effects of this reform were reversed by president Fernando Belaúnde Terry in the 1980s.

A third land reform occurred as part of a counterterrorism effort against the Shining Path during the Internal conflict in Peru roughly 1988–1995, led by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy during the early years of the government of Alberto Fujimori, before the latter's ''auto-coup''.

Venezuela

In 2001, Hugo Chávez's government enacted Plan Zamora to redistribute government and unused private land to ''campesinos'' in need.

The plan met with heavy opposition which led to a coup attempt in 2002. When Pedro Carmona'' (which means "big landownership"), most receivers of the land didn't have any knowledge about how to cultivate the land and grow crops. In many cases, peasants didn't even water, since water infrastructures were still missing in most of the regions.

Moreover, in some cases, ''campesinos'' didn't gain direct ownership of the land, but only the right to farm it without having to pay the rent and without sanctions from the government, and in some cases the land wasn't given to single peasant family, but managed in communes. According to some sources, the expropriated land amounts to 4-5 million hectares.

Paraguay

Paraguay has been known to have experienced some obstacles in its political history that have been known mostly as dictatorship and corruption. Paraguay's history is what has shaped the Paraguay we see today and as well as what has brought along the unequal land distributions. From the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) Paraguay came out losing land to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay as well as suffered from a great decline in population and was left with political instability. Land in Paraguay has been known to be unequally distributed therefore prolonging rural poverty in Paraguay. Following the Triple Alliance War the nation underwent a 35-year dictatorship of President Alfredo Stroessner in the years of 1954 to 1989. Stroessner was known to take away many campesino's land in order to give it to military officials, foreign corporations and civilian supporters, "over eight million hectares of state-owned land (20 percent of total land) were given away or sold at negligible prices to friends of the regime, who accumulated huge tracts of land."https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/Paraguay_background.pdf Stroessner also faked an alliance with the Colorado Party in order to distribute public land. Campesinos' cries for help for land reform were ignored and the prosecution against them continued, causing them to suffer from high poverty rates. June S. Beittel said that as a result of the unequal distribution of land it left, “ rural areas the most poverty-stricken.” In the year of 1954, the Truth and Justice Committee focused on getting justice for the abuses many Campesinos were facing from their own government.

After decades of controversy over government land policy, two agrarian laws were created in 1963. These laws were known as the Agrarian Statute, "limiting the maximum size of landholding to 10,000 hectares in Eastern Paraguay and 20,000 hectares in the Chaco." However, these laws were rarely enforced. Under the Agrarian Statute, there was also the creation of IBR (Instituto de Bienestar Rural) which "mandated to plan colonization programs, issue land titles to farmers, and provide new colonies with support services." Although IBR focused on serving the land needs of farmers their task was so big and its resources so little that their goals for helping farmers were out of reach.

Paraguayan democracy came a long way after its 35-year dictatorship, but the unequal distribution of land is still a problem for the nation since their economy is one that is dependent on its agriculture. A census in 2008 revealed that “80 percent of agriculture land is held by just 1.6 percent of landowners, with the 600 largest properties occupying 40 percent of the total productive land. More than 300,000 family farmers have no land at all.” Paraguayans have formed unions such as National Federation of Campesinos (FNC) who has fought for justice on the unequal land distributions in Latin America they have helped many campesinos reclaim acres of land since 1989. The ongoing inequality of land distribution has led to a demand for land regulation. Citizens remain cautious about the nation's democracy and fearful of the return of dictatorship and corruption.

The problem regarding land distribution has worsened recently due to the expansion of monoculture in specific, soy. Paraguay has become the fourth world's largest distributors of soy. Due to this distribution, soy companies are the largest landowners, taking over 80 percent of the land. This production has negatively impacted the lives of rural peasants by leaving them without their own land. Thus, in March 2017, the streets of Paraguay's capital were filled with more than 1000 campesinos demanding for agrarian reform.

Thousands of rural peasants demand access to land, fair agricultural prices for what they produce and technical assistance. Due to the increase in soy production, campesinos has been forced out of their lands leading them to demand land regulations. This demand of the stabilization and fairness of agricultural prices is a result of Paraguay's government failing to sustain secure prices for their produce which are leaving them to live in extreme poverty. In the effect of no secure economy for their produce, campesinos mandate technical help.

A great majority of Paraguayans continue to practice subsistence agriculture in the depths of the Paraguayan ''campo'' (countryside). Despite their struggle with poverty, inequality and land rights, Paraguayans are proud of their campesino structure and the traditional culture that arises from it, with this culture being the most prominent in Paraguay than anywhere else in Latin America.

In December 2017, “over one-third of the population was impoverished

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