Land without Masters: Agrarian Reform and Political Change under Peru's Military Government

Abstract

Anna Cant's book is an innovative study of the politics of the most radical agrarian reform in Latin America, in terms of the land expropriated; the speed with which cooperatives were created; and their rapid collapse and subsequent division into small, individually owned private property units. Peru's agrarian reform was not associated with violence, and was managed by a special bureaucracy under a left-leaning radical military government.On June 24, 1970, Gen. Juan Velasco Alvardo decreed the beginning of this agrarian reform. Television newscasts of the army occupying the largest sugar plantations amazed even the most skeptical civilians. Another part of the reform effort was carried out in the Andean highlands, dissolving the traditional hacienda system and liberating the Indigenous colono population who were obligated to work without pay in exchange for small subsistence plots.Agrarian reforms were demanded by communists, unions and worker movements, peasants, and revolutionary thinkers for at least half a century prior. Such reforms were also deemed a priority for Latin America by the West, backed by international institutions such as the Organization of American States, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. Velasco's government declared that it was neither communist nor capitalist, but nationalist and reformist. It ruled through a corporatist, top-down bureaucracy that affected businesses, institutions, communications, social norms, schools, and civilians from every walk of life.This book is a remarkable study of the most controversial aspect of this dictatorship's rule, the Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (SINAMOS). Its phonetic pronunciation could be understood in Spanish as sin amos, without masters. SINAMOS was eventually shut down in the second phase of the military rule by General Francisco Morales Bermudez in 1976 when the military had become unpopular and SINAMOS its most visible target.Subsequent regimes, especially Alberto Fujimori's, dedicated themselves to undoing most of Velasco's policies. The state apparatus was weakened and decentralized, and its archives were dispersed. Neglected papers decayed or were destroyed. With meticulous and cleverly applied methods and lots of patience, Anna Cant has reconstructed the activities of SINAMOS's offices in three regions: Piura on the North Coast, Cuzco in the Highlands, and the coastal department of Tacna on the border with Chile.Chapter 2 presents the results. SINAMOS caused tensions between different bureaucracies as newly recruited intellectuals from the Left exasperated officers of the ancien régime with their rhetoric. In Piura, preexisting unions, peasant confederations, and land-hungry social movements promoted land occupations before, during, and after Velasco's decrees, and consequently, SINAMOS's expropriations competed with peasant land occupations on the same terrain. In Cuzco, enthusiasm for the Confederación Campesina Peruana led to a lukewarm response to the recruitment efforts of the pro-Velasco Confederación Nacional Agraria. SINAMOS also fostered the recognition of official comunidades campesinas created from the lands and people of ex-haciendas, and these communities sabotaged the efforts of the gigantic collective state farm that government agencies had created. Finally, in Tacna, a region of smallholder properties without many haciendas to expropriate, SINAMOS was met with indifference.In Chapter 3, Cant examines SINAMOS's activities promoting the extension of citizens' rights, aimed at awakening the Indigenous political consciousness while devising mechanisms to make it congruent with Indigenous cultural norms as well as those of the nation. It moved away from the image of meek inferiority so that Indigenous people could occupy their rightful space in the modern nation of Peru. SINAMOS adapted and incorporated pedagogical techniques to reach out to colonos, the landless, and very poor casual laborers. Velasco renamed the Indians campesinos to address them as beneficiaries of the agrarian reform. Practices included literacy campaigns, puppet theaters, broadcasting programs, and official recognition of the Quechua and Aymara languages and their use in newspapers, TV, and radio shows.Though short-lived, these initiatives did a lot for the peasant population. The literacy campaign, for example, produced people who could sign only their name, but that permitted their acquisition of citizen papers and a legal identity. Educational reform pushed the children of campesinos into schools, wearing a single uniform that erased class distinctions, and the officialization of Indigenous languages brought smiles to waiters in Lima restaurants. Though a token, this was important. In carrying out its mandate to politicize the downtrodden campesino, SINAMOS incorporated other branches of government, culture, education, mass communications, and legal affairs into the tasks of social mobilization. Though brief, SINAMOS's impact was important. I agree with Cant that the effects of these measures went beyond the agrarian reform, that they were part of the social and political emancipation that the reform intended, and that it planted the seeds of processes that are still ongoing.On the other hand, the reform and SINAMOS generated strong opposition. Resentments and critiques often relied on cruel humor in gossip circles; Velasco's stern face became a repeated image in anticommunist editorials. A powerful right-wing opinion regarded the Velasco regime as a total disaster. The other side responded, in more measured terms, that Velasco's reform was a watershed in social and political terms. I compared it to the abolition of slavery in the Americas in Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform (2009). Those changes are more lasting and are relevant to a rethinking of the historical trajectory of the nation. The agrarian reform emancipated a lot of people with an official act, full of its own limitations and contradictions and accompanied by a maverick style of interventions of which SINAMOS was the most interesting example. While middle-class urban rhetoric demonizes Velasco, his memory is still admired and maintained by more marginalized people, with gratitude for his programs expressed in shantytowns, villages, and campesino homes.