ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses three Latin American examples of agrarian and land reform: Mexico, Nicaragua, and Brazil. These comprise important cases from different parts of the region and with different trajectories, but all indicating the relatively limited nature of Latin American land reforms. This situation reflects either lack of redistribution (Brazil), lack of support and constraints following land reform (Mexico), or the advent of war and counter-reforms soon after (Nicaragua; see also Chapter 6). These examples also indicate the general exclusion and marginalisation of women within the region's agrarian reforms (Deere and León 1987, 2001), signalling both weaknesses in policy and the strength of domestic ideologies and ‘marianista-machista’ 1 gender regimes. The experiences also differ from those discussed in the previous section. In most of Latin America, land reforms were organised predominantly along individual household lines or else with a mix of collective and individual household tenures, but always co-existing with a large capitalist sector.