Peruvian Agrarian Reform

The Agrarian Reform in Peru was a process of land redistribution initiated in the 1960s by struggles of peasants for their land in the Cusco Region and legally implemented by three laws of land reform, of which the land reform law promulgated in 1969 under General Juan Velasco Alvarado changed the country's agrarian infrastructure from a system dominated by haciendas where the ''peones'' – in their majority indigenous peasants – worked for their ''patrones'', the ''hacendados'', in semi-feudal relationships, first to large cooperatives controlled by the state and then predominantly to land ownership by smallholders, in the Andes to a large extent within indigenous peasant communities ''(comunidades campesinas)'' recognized by the government. For the former ''hacendados'', the government of Peru issued agrarian bonds as compensation for land expropriation.

Agrarian society before 1969

The extensive haciendas of Peru were a result of land concentration in colonial times, when the Spanish landlords were assigned pieces of land formerly belonging to the indigenous population. After the independence of Peru, restrictions for landowners to protect the indigenous peasants were lifted, and the haciendas expanded largely at cost of the indigenous communities.Román Robles Mendoza: ''Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas''. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), Lima 2002, pp. 61–68.

In the years between 1900 and 1918, the sugar cane haciendas in Chicama Valley in the Department of La Libertad were acquired by three industrial giants: the Larco brothers (related to the family of José A. Larco), Graham Rowe and Co (British export company) and the Gildemeister family (merchants from Bremen).

In the Peruvian constitution enacted in 1920 under Augusto B. Leguía, indigenous communities were recognized as legal entities for the first time in Peruvian history, which gave them the right to land property and legal protection against expropriation by the haciendas. However, in the 1920s there was an uprising of Quechua peasants in the province of Anta against the landlords which was repressed by security forces. In 1936, the rights of the indigenous communities were also included in the Civil Code (Código Civil). The indigenous communities that could prove their historical existence as legal entities got land titles, which gave them legal protection against expropriation by the haciendas. By the year of 2000, 5660 communities were recognized.

Preceding agrarian reforms in Peru

In November 1962, the military government of Ricardo Pérez Godoy enacted the Agrarian Reform Law D.L. N° 14328. In 1963, the military government of Nicolás Lindley decreed the Agrarian Reform Law (Decreto Ley No 14444) creating the Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization (IRAC, Instituto de Reforma Agraria y Colonización) and started a process of Agrarian Reform in La Convención Province and Lares Valley (Department of Cuzco), reacting to land occupations by peasants organized in the CCP (Confederación Campesina del Perú) under the leadership of Hugo Blanco Galdós who were organizing a regional agrarian reform on the own, expelling the hacendados. The third agrarian reform law was adopted by the Peruvian Congress in 1964 when Fernando Belaúnde Terry was president (Ley de Reforma Agraria N° 15037). This reform did not include the large estates on the northern coast, and its application was blocked by a Congress majority of APRA and the right-wing Unión Nacional Odriista.Román Robles Mendoza: ''Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas''. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), Lima 2002, pp. 64–65. Up to 300.000 peasants in the Andes marched in protest for a real agrarian reform.

The Agrarian Reform by Juan Velasco Alvarado

A program of agrarian reform was resumed by the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru of general Juan Velasco Alvarado who overthrew Belaúnde's government on 3 October 1968. On 24 June 1969, the Agrarian Reform Law (Decreto Ley N° 17716 de Ley de Reforma Agraria) was promulgated. The government declared the following objectives of the reform:
El proceso de reforma agraria, Objetivos de la reforma agrarian.
' Ministerio de Agricultura y Riego. Archived on 23 November 2020.
# Elimination of large estates (haciendas: ''latifundios'') and smallholding (''minifundios'')
# Formation of production cooperatives owned by peasants
# Restructuring of traditional peasant communities
# Formation of agriculture based on the common effort of the peasants
# Creation of new markets by just distribution of entry which improves the acquisition power of marginalized populations
# Parallel development of primary transformation industries in the field

The agro-industrial complexes on the coast were the first to be expropriated. On 26 June 1969, two days after promulgation of the law, armed soldiers entered the sugar haciendas of the northern coast to take the installations and expel their owners.

In contrast to Belaúnde's reform, no exemptions for owners of large estates were allowed. Between June 1969 and June 1979, more than 9 million hectares of land representing 15,826 lots were expropriated, benefitting some 370,000 families, much more than the approximately 1 million hectares from 546 haciendas in the time of Belaúnde's government. In the beginning, the expropriated estates were not distributed, but were left intact, concentrated and collectivized. 15,000 expropriated estates were transformed into 1,708 cooperatives. The expropriated landowners had to accept agrarian bonds within 20 to 30 years at an interest rate of 4 to 6% p.a. as compensation.

Two types of cooperatives were formed: Agrarian Production Cooperatives (Cooperativas Agrarias de Producción, CAP) and Agrarian Societies of Social Interest (Sociedades Agrícolas de Interés Social, SAIS). The CAPs were formed mainly in the coastal haciendas producing cash crops such as sugar cane, cotton and rice for the external as well as for the internal market, but also in the Andean region of Cuzco, among them the CAP José Zúñiga Letona at the former hacienda Huarán in the Calca District, where the film Kuntur Wachana was made, the cooperative of Ninamarca, whose first director was the famous peasant leader Saturnino Huillca Quispe, and the huge CAP Tupac Amaru II in Anta Province, which produced for the internal market. These cooperatives were owned by the agricultural workers in form of collective ownership. The SAIS were organized as cattle-holding cooperatives owned by agricultural workers grazing livestock and associated with traditional neighboring peasant communities.

On 9 May 1972, Law Nº 19400 was promulgated, which dissolved the organizations of the hacendados: the National Agrarian Society (Sociedad Nacional Agraria, SNA), the Association of Stockbreeders (Asociación de Ganaderos) and the Association of Rice Producers (Asociación de Productores de Arroz). Instead, the organization of the beneficiaries of the agrarian reform, the National Agrarian Confederation of Peru ( Confederación Nacional Agraria, CNA), was founded on 3 October 1974.

The ascription of the former haciendas to cooperatives controlled by bureaucrats and engineers led to great dissatisfaction among the indigenous peasants and the traditional peasant communities who wanted to get back their lands taken from them by the hacendados. Land occupations of cooperative lands started as early as 1973 in the huge cooperative “Tupac Amaru II” also called Machu Asnu (“Old Donkey”) in Anta Province (department of Cuzco), formed out of 105 former haciendas expropriated between 1971 and 1973. The leadership of the cooperative did not even speak the language of the peasants, Cuzco Quechua. The land occupations were organized by the oppositional peasant organization CCP, which had already occupied lands in the 1960s. In the following years, the lands of the cooperative were distributed among the indigenous communities, and in 1980, it was dissolved. Other land occupations took place in the department of Apurimac where the authorities had not even started expropriations of landlords. After the destitution of Velasco by Francisco Morales Bermúdez, the expropriations were continued although in other political areas, the left-wing policies were reversed.

Second government of Belaúnde Terry and government of Alan García

According to Enrique Mayer, Fernando Belaúnde Terry “did his best to derail the agrarian reform”. However, properties were not returned to the oligarchy, but cooperatives were turned into independent enterprises that could be dissolved by their members. In the following years, most of the cooperative land in the Andes was distributed among indigenous communities and smallholders, resulting in a radical restructuring of land distribution in Peru.Enrique Mayer: ''Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform.'' Duke University Press, Durham and London 2009, pp. 28, 29. Peasants in the Andes, mostly organized in the CCP, recuperated lands by massive occupations, the last of which were the spectacular land occupations in the Department of Puno between 1987 and 1989. By the end of the 1980s, according to Enrique Mayer, the indigenous communities (peasant communities) got most of the land in the Andes, and only partly the cooperatives had been a phase in between, for in many cases, the indigenous peasants of the former haciendas simply refused to turn them into cooperatives, and after that they got the land as a community directly. According to him, “the landowning class was totally eliminated from the countryside” in the highlands.

Few cooperatives remained, such as the sheep-holding SAIS Tupac Amaru N° 1 located in Pachacayo (Junín) with more than 200,000 hectares of land as of 2012, still active in 2021 with 30,000 peasants and 16 associated communities. Some cooperatives were destroyed by actions of the Maoist Shining Path during the internal conflict in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the regions of Ayacucho and Junín. This was the case with the sheep-holding SAIS “Cahuide” in Junín, which was later distributed among peasant communities and smallholders.

Alberto Fujimori

Under Alberto Fujimori, Absalón Vásquez, the son of an agricultural worker at the sugar cooperative (CAP) of Casa Grande in Chicama Valley, became agricultural minister. He privatized the remaining sugar cooperatives in this traditional region of sugar production, which by then had been severely indebted to banks, and sold them to the agricultural corporations Gloria (Rodríguez Banda family), Wong and Oviedo at the end of the 1990s.
Perú: Tres grupos empresariales: Gloria, Wong y Oviedo son los nuevos barones del azúcar.
' Servindi, 27 August 2013.

References

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Social history of Peru
Economic history of Peru
Legal history of Peru