The Promise of Dignity

By Marguerite Johnson

Will the rightists continue a troubled but necessary program ?

Agrarian reform, because there is nothing better than a mountain, a hut and a new dawn.

Out in the cattle country of western El Salvador, the billboard stands against the wide sky and the grazing flatlands. But its confident statement of hope has become a bitter irony to the farmers at nearby El Canada, a cooperative set up under an ambitious land reform program begun two years ago. It is planting time at El Canada, but the cooperative has been unable to obtain credit to buy seed and fertilizer. The fields are fallow, the oxen idle. No one has yet received a day's pay. Unless the tomato and corn crops are planted in the next week or two, there will be no harvest this year.

The problems at El Espino, a coffee cooperative on the outskirts of the capital of San Salvador, are of a somewhat different sort. El Espino's shareholders and their families, who number more than 1,000, have just been told that the government is planning to confiscate their best acreage to build four new military barracks and a training ground. Jose Eduardo Gonzalez, 47, raised his six children on the plantation, and he is distraught about being forced to move. Like many of the farmers, he admits that living conditions were sometimes better under the old oligarchical system in which the landowner doled out food, shelter and medicine as he saw fit. But Gonzalez still favors the land reform program. Says he: "We all have more dignity now."

The problems of the campesinos are not entirely new. From the start, El Salvador's land redistribution program has suffered from poor administration, insufficient credit lines and corruption. But the election on March 28 of a constituent assembly dominated by right-wing parties has raised fresh concerns. Major Roberto d'Aubuisson, head of the ultraright Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and president of the new assembly, vigorously attacked the program during the election campaign, and last week he declared that he favored a "moratorium" on land reforms. Advocates of the program fear that D'Aubuisson will quietly try to sabotage it. Leaders of two large campesino organizations charge that since the election, thousands of peasants have been illegally evicted from their plots by landowners who are frequently backed by paramilitary forces and local police. Says Roy Prosterman, a U.S. law professor who was a consultant on El Salvador's agrarian reforms: "There is currently a popular expression in the assembly, 'Land reform is fine, but it has to be perfected.' Many of us fear that that is a code word for 'destroyed.' "

Former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who was a member of the junta that implemented the program with strong U.S. support in 1980, is also concerned that D'Aubuisson's backers may try to subvert it. If this should happen, Duarte told TIME last week, he will withdraw his Christian Democratic deputies from the new assembly, thereby denying it "legitimacy." Said he: "This country needs a change of structure. We have to use what few natural resources we have, along with our best natural resource--our people. We call this justice. The extreme right calls this Communism."

The land reform program was started with two main objectives: 1) to end the feudal stranglehold that a few families held on the country's agricultural and economic wealth, and 2) to deprive the growing leftist insurgency of an opportunity to exploit the grievances of the peasantry. It was to be carried out in three phases:

>Under Phase 1, estates larger than 1,235 acres, which produce about half of the sugar crop, 38% of the cotton and 12% of the coffee, were to be expropriated, with compensation to their owners, transferred to workers who had been employed on them, and turned into cooperatives. So far, 330 large estates have been reassigned to some 30,000 workers and their families. The estates were left intact to keep them operating efficiently.

> Phase 2 called for the expropriation of farms ranging from 247 to 1,235 acres in size, but the government postponed this part of the program indefinitely, considering it to be economically unfeasible.

> Under Phase 3, the so-called land-to-the-tiller decree, peasants were permitted to buy the tiny plots (up to 17 acres) that they had been working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. About 29,000 farmers, out of a potential 125,000, have applied for ownership.

The Duarte government, however, was unaccountably slow in actually paying compensation to former landlords and in delivering new titles to the cooperatives. Of the 330 farms turned into cooperatives, only six have been given clear titles of ownership. All of the farmers who bought land under Phase 3 have received only provisional titles. Says Salvadoran Communal Union Leader Guillermo Blanco:

"The campesino has no idea whether he owns the land or not." Farm leaders fear that the frustrated campesinos may respond by supporting the guerrillas. Warns an official of the Salvadoran Institute of

Agrarian Transformation (ISTA): "If ARENA reverses the reforms, there will be a river of blood through this country."

U.S. officials, meanwhile, continue to give the program high marks and strong backing. American experts say that adjustments are necessary to make it more effective, but they caution that it is far too soon to expect economic gains. Observed a U.S. analyst in San Salvador: "How many businesses can turn a profit after two years, especially under business conditions like those of El Salvador?"

The challenge will be to convince El Salvador's new leaders that there is no alternative to reform. Says Economist Ronald J. Ivey, who conducted a study of the program for the U.S. Agency for International Development: "Once you give a man the right to own land and he feels what that is like, to take that away from him will require a real fight." --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by Timothy Loughran/San Salvador

With reporting by Timothy Loughran

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