ABSTRACT
Since the Mexican Revolution of the peasants under the leadership of Emilio Zapata in 1911, which instituted the first Latin American land reform of 1915, land property rights in Latin American countries have witnessed diverse forms of change, particularly during the 1950s. This paper identifies these forms of change introduced by redistributive land reform in Bolivia and Cuba, and land settlement programmes in Paraguay and Ecuador, where the present writer worked or conducted field studies between October 1957 and February 1960, in his capacity as FAO land reform expert. The present (1959) land-tenure problems are rooted in the agrarian system
created upon the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers nearly four centuries ago. The colonizers established large private estates (latifundios) on which the indigenous rural population (indios) and imported African slaves were employed as labour for cattle raising and the production of cash crops for export. The colonial landlords considered the compulsory labour of the native peasants (campesinos) as part of their land property rights and conditions have grown worse ‘over the five centuries since the conquest and after more than a century of republican life’.1 The Mexican land reform was the first of a series of efforts by national leaders to free the campesinos from servitude by abolishing latifundios, and the redistribution of their land property rights in favour of the actual cultivators (campesinos). The leaders intended also to ensure them opportunities to own land, and to provide them with socio-economic security. The new concept of land property rights has been embodied in a series of land reform laws (reforma agraria) and colonization (land settlements on publicly owned land) emphasizing the following: the setting of upper and lower limits on land ownership; and the definition of property rights and duties of the new land owners with regard to the disposition of their land units by sale, mortgage and lease, and in their joint or collective use of farm land. Before the discussion proceeds further, it must be made clear that, as other
papers and working groups of this seminar will enlighten us with regard to the current agrarian developments in Latin America, this paper concentrates on
the current situation in the four countries pointed out earlier (Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Paraguay) without a detailed evaluation of each country’s land policy. In brief, their programmes consist of two major types: first, land settlement schemes granting land ownership to the peasants in specific areas of the country without changing directly the pattern of agrarian property rights in the rest of the country, with them remaining in conditions of inequalities and tenure insecurity; second, expropriating privately owned land in excess of an established upper limit for its distribution in family land ownership units and its use individually or jointly within cooperative organizations. Both the Bolivian 1953 Law and the Cuban 1959 Law follow this second type which radically changes land property rights, in addition to some land settlements established on reclaimed public lands in the Oriente in Bolivia and in Cienaga de Zapata in Cuba.
