ABSTRACT
The 1953 Bolivian Agrarian Reform Decree harkened back to earlier attempts to radically alter the rural order. A decade after the agrarian reform decree, sharecropping was found on one in ten estates and wage labor on 41 percent of the estates, where peasants, per decree, were obligated to work for landlords at sublegal wages. As the expropriative process progressed, it became obvious that a significant category of hacienda workers had been overlooked in the agrarian reform decree. The intent of the 1953 Agrarian Reform Decree, granting land to those who work it, was to end the colonato and thereby eliminate the underpinning of the landed oligarchy. The coca leaf is the most valuable Yungas product and development of cocales (coca plots) proliferated following the Agrarian Reform Decree as peasants sold their thrice-annual coca harvests to peripatetic middlemen for resale in the markets of Coroico, Coripata, or in distant La Paz. The Agrarian Reform Decree mandated the formation of agrarian cooperatives.
