The Land-Reform Lesson

Start a Latin American reformer talking, and he will begin reciting the region's needs almost by rote: schools, houses, hospitals -- and, always, land reform. As his example of land reform, he invariably points to Mexico, where land and liberty, tierra y libertad, was the war cry of Emiliano Zapata when his peasant army sacked the giant haciendas and occupied Mexico City in the bloody 1910 revolution. In those days, 835 rich families controlled 97% of the country's cultivated land. But not for long. In 1913, leading a band of armed riders, Revolutionary Major Lucio Blanco seized the 370-acre estate of a nephew of deposed Dictator Porfirio Diaz. Blanco divided the land, and seven campesinos were ushered to their new property. That was 50 years ago this week.

Planned Success. Since then, in theory, all a landless Mexican peasant has to do to get a farm is petition the government. If his claim is legitimate, he can then colonize unsettled government lands, join a communal farm called an ejido (pronounced eh-hee-doh), or move onto nearby expropriated plots. Land on any private farm that exceeds the government-set acreage ceiling, running from 250 acres to 1,500 acres, according to improvements, is subject to expropriation without compensation. Since the revolution, governments have parceled out some 125 million acres to 2,700,000 families and established 25,000 ejidos. And distribution still goes on; in the past five years, President Adolfo Lopez Mateos has expropriated and parceled out 30 million acres of farmland.

In practice, where proper planning precedes the opening up of new, tillable land, reform has worked. At some of the large ejidos on the dry, rocky central plateaus, resettled peasants now have irrigated fields, modern machinery, new roads to market, radios and refrigerators, and tuition-free trade schools. New villages with thriving shops and markets have sprung up near the farms. The government provides low-interest loans for modern equipment and technical training. Mexican land reform, says the government, is in a "constructive phase," and since 1959 more than 26,000 people have hacked out new farms and villages on tracts of virgin land.

Victims of Failure. But land reform often goes wrong. One of the early land-reforming presidents, Plutarco Elias Calles, left office in 1928 disillusioned. "Happiness of the peasants," he said, "cannot be assured by giving them a patch of land, if they lack preparation and the necessary elements to cultivate it." On uneconomic small plots carved out of land fit only for cattle-grazing or large-scale farming, peasants often fall hopelessly in debt or become victims of land speculators. Those who still use the wooden stick plows of their grandfathers can scarcely scratch out a living on plots that average only twelve acres. On remaining private farms with prime land and modern machinery, production runs about 20% ahead of the ejidos.

The good and the bad of the Mexican experience are both valuable as object lessons for the rest of Latin America, and some of the original unqualified cries for land reform under the Alliance for Progress are now being tempered by more realistic judgments. The clear need in South America is to open up the region's vast, unused tracts to ambitious, hard-working homesteaders trained in modern techniques and encouraged to raise crops suited to the soil. But as a political gimmick to chop up existing productive large farms merely to satisfy clamorous masses, land reform means more demagoguery than sound economics.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.