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El Salvador Agrarian Reform
During the 1970s, as Salvadoran emigrants returned from
Honduras, increased pressure for available land pushed the issue
of agrarian reform to the forefront of national life. Various
peasant and trade union organizations, with the tacit support of
many others, including middle-sector business people,
professionals, and public-sector employees, as well as certain
church groups, increased their activities and demonstrations in
support of reform. The response from the military-controlled
government stressed the maintenance of public order, through
repression if necessary, over political change. The polarizing
effect of this attitude prompted concerned pro-reform military
officers to take power in 1979. One of the priorities of the
junta governments that followed was agrarian reform
(see The Reformist Coup of 1979
, ch. 1).
Peasant organizations were disorganized, mainly as a result
of violent actions directed against their members by right-wing
groups, and were unable to exert much influence on the junta
government at the time of the original agrarian reform decree in
1980. For its part, the government also failed to consult with
these groups regarding the best ways to proceed in such an
undertaking. Having the most to lose in this process, the
majority of the economic elite, particularly the agrarian and
financial interests, bitterly opposed such measures on principle.
These interests had opposed--and successfully defeated in the
planning stage--several earlier agrarian reform measures
suggested by previous governments
(see The 1970s: The Road to Revolt
, ch. 1).
The overall agrarian reform program was to be implemented in
three phases, only the first of which achieved any effective
results. Phase I called for the expropriation of all landholdings
over 500 hectares, with owners allowed to keep as "reserve" 100
to 150 hectares, depending on land quality, in order to continue
farming. The government, aided by the army, expropriated over 230
estates, comprising 15 percent of El Salvador's farmland (or 10
percent, if reserve lands are excluded). This included 14 percent
of total coffee land, 31 percent of cotton land, and 24 percent
of sugarcane land; over 60 percent of the expropriated holdings,
however, were pasture or fallow land, including forests and
mountains not well suited to cultivation.
The expropriated estates were not subdivided, but were turned
into cooperatives run by a hierarchy of skilled managers and
unskilled laborers. Under this arrangement, little changed in
terms of day-to-day operations. In spite of the communal
implications of the cooperative concept, the traditional social
hierarchy of managers and unskilled labor remained. In many
cases, the same administrators, who still had strong ties with
previous landlords and their interests, gave the same orders to
the same workers, who saw little evidence of change in their dayto -day situation. The former landowners initially continued to
derive income from production on the cooperatives, as part of the
cooperatives' profits went to an agrarian reform fund from which
the former owners were to be compensated. In addition, because
the former landowners could retain 100 hectares, they were often
able to keep control of the best land or of processing
facilities, which, if necessary, could be reclassified as urban
properties. Some landowners also had sufficient time to begin to
decapitalize their farms. Some had removed livestock and
machinery; others had slaughtered cattle rather than transfer
them to the newly created cooperatives. These actions
significantly reduced the value of the cooperatives, especially
considering that the majority of land affected by Phase I was
pasture land.
Since the members of the cooperatives included only the few
full-time workers on estates at the time of expropriation, which
took place during an off-season period of low labor needs, Phase
I did not affect the majority of the population in these regions.
Similarly, because the expropriated estates were located in the
coastal plain and central valleys, they did not benefit landless
peasants in the north and east. Of an original 317 cooperatives,
22 had been abandoned by 1987 as a result of inadequate technical
and credit assistance from the government, as well as the adverse
economic effects of the civil conflict.
As of 1987, Phase II of the agrarian reform program had not
been implemented. The official explanation for the prolonged
inaction cited shortcomings in administrative expertise and
financial resources; unofficially, political pressures appeared
to be equally influential. Phase II originally called for
expropriation of all estates between 100 and 500 hectares in
size. Many larger landowners, sensing that land reform was
imminent, had previously divided their larger estates among
family members, and their holdings, including many coffee
estates, now fell within this range.
The junta governments' failure to implement Phase II allowed
the Constituent Assembly to redefine the provisions of land
reform that eventually were incorporated into the Constitution of
1983
(see The Constitution of 1983
, ch. 4). The assembly,
dominated by representatives of conservative political parties,
raised the ceiling on maximum allowable landholdings from 100 to
245 hectares. This had the effect of reducing the amount of land
available for redistribution from about 72,400 hectares, or 5
percent of Salvadoran farmland, to about 54,300 hectares, or 3.7
percent of farmland. Owners of medium-sized farms had been
prohibited by the original 1980 reform decree from selling their
holdings; the assembly now granted these owners up to three years
to sell their excess holdings to peasants or peasant
associations. This provision shifted the onus of reallocation of
land from the government to the landowners, thus ameliorating
somewhat the problem of inadequate government resources for this
purpose.
Phase III, also known as the Land to the Tiller program,
mandated that ownership of land that was leased, rented, or
sharecropped would be transferred to the tiller. Implementation
of this phase was slow and difficult. If fully realized, Phase
III was projected to involve some 13.6 percent of farmland and
some 117,000 peasant families. Each beneficiary was allowed to
seek title to no more than seven hectares; in practice, given the
small size of existing rental plots, many were granted title to
plots well below that size; as of 1987, the average Phase III
beneficiary had been granted title to a plot of less than two
hectares.
By mid-1987 only 56,188 potential beneficiaries had applied
for title to 79,142 parcels of land. The granting of definitive
titles was hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency and chronic
budget shortfalls, so that the overwhelming majority of claimants
were forced to continue working the land under provisional title.
The failure to grant even provisional titles to the remaining
60,000 or so potential beneficiaries was attributed in part to
the inability of the government to contact all of these small
farmers. Furthermore, the seven-hectare limit, also referred to
as the retention rule, excluded some 12,000 beneficiaries who did
not farm their land directly but were landlords of smallholdings.
In its early stages, implementation of Phase III was also
complicated by the illegal eviction of peasants by landowners.
Moreover, the involvement of army personnel in the
implementation of agrarian reform led to an upsurge in combat
between government and
guerrilla forces in the countryside. This was the case
particularly in the northern departments of Chalatenango,
Morazan, and Cuscatlan, where there were few privately owned
estates but where rural mass organizations were influential. The
heightened army presence, combined with population dislocation,
reportedly contributed to increased civil unrest in these areas.
Data as of November 1988
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