The Cry for Land Reform

A bobbing sea of flag-waving Mexican peasants jammed into the main plaza in Oaxaca last week to witness one of the rituals of contemporary Latin America. President Lopez Mateos announced that his government had just expropriated 267,000 acres belonging to the U.S.-owned Real Estate Co. of Mexico. The land would be added to 807,000 acres of government property, and divided among peasant farmers.

Of all Latin American nations, Mexico has waved the magic wand of land reform longest. Before the 1910 revolution, 97% of Mexico's farm land was held by 836 owners. Today 65% of the old haciendas have been divided into cooperatives, the rest given to small farmers. But now even in well-reformed Mexico, the need to feed a suddenly ballooning population grows daily--along with a peasant land hunger fanned by the propaganda of Fidel Castro.

The twin pressures of hunger and desire are increasing throughout Latin America, making the land reform the No. 1 issue. Panama wisely began an integrated plan of land development in 1956; Venezuela, starting in 1959. has already moved 30,000 new farm families onto 2,500,000 acres under President Romulo Betancourt's crash program. Brazil's Janio Quadros and Colombia's Alberto Lleras Camargo are pushing comprehensive reform and agrarian-development laws through their Congress.

In most other Latin nations, land reform is more talked about than brought about. Chile has been talking reform for 30 years, but has settled only an estimated 4,000 families on redistributed land. In Peru, where peasant incomes are among the world's lowest, land-reform legislation is pending--and still pending. The need and the delay are much the same in Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador.

The one thing likely to be worse than no land reform at all is a mismanaged land reform. In Bolivia, peasants moved into the big landowners' fields after the 1952 revolution, barbecued the livestock and planted only enough crops for their individual families. Land reform failed and now the country, which was once self-sufficient, has to import more than half its food. With the same kind of rush, Fidel Castro grabbed Cuba's richest landholdings, turned most into cooperatively owned ventures. Food production fell immediately, and Castro switched to the Soviet scheme of state-controlled "People's Farms." But the People's Farms are not succeeding either, and fertile Cuba faces growing shortages of every staple, from arroz to polio.

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