ABSTRACT

Postcolonial Latin America experienced recurrent mass mobilizations for land distribution, with well-known examples including the Zapatistas in early 20th century Mexico or the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in contemporary Brazil. The region also witnessed several large-scale land reform projects with the aim of redistributing land in a more equitable manner, such as the reforms enacted under Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico during the 1930s and under the Velasco regime in Peru during the 1970s. At the same time, Latin America continues to be marked by extreme land inequality (de Ferranti et al., 2004; Hoffman and Centeno, 2003). Large swathes of land tend to be concentrated in the hands of a few large landowners. And the last decades have done nothing to break this pattern. Trade liberalization, in tandem with the large-scale commercialization of agriculture and a dramatically expanding “frontier of extraction” have increased pressures on established landholding patterns, ultimately reinforcing the unequal distribution of land across the region (Bebbington et al., 2008; Zoomers, 2000).