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

Abstract

In 1969, a group of self-claimed radical military officers led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, aided by able technocrats and a favorable hemispheric context, unleashed the last comprehensive agrarian reform of twentieth-century Latin America. After a coup and through a combination of an allegedly emancipatory discourse and authoritarian means, the purportedly radical generals aimed to transform the material foundations of the country by dismantling the hacienda system and empowering the campesinado, the disenfranchised mass of rural Indigenous peasants in the countryside. Until the publication of Land without Masters, the entangled history of this agrarian reform remained largely unaddressed by historians. Deploying a combination of methodologies—including regional archive research, oral histories, and visual analysis, among others—Anna Cant offers us a comprehensive analysis of the precedents, making, unmaking, and legacies of General Velasco's foremost experiment. Grounding her analysis on three distinctive regions of Peru, Cant convincingly shows how the reach and scope of the military revolution (an oxymoron) presented both redemptive promises and demands of subordination that produced clashing understandings of what the reform meant for the state, the campesinado, and the many in between. Land without Masters vividly reconstructs the tensions, conflicts, and enduring memories around the agrarian reform as an unfulfilled and yet truly transformative historical episode in the history of Peru and Latin America.The book's structure benefits the clarity of Cant's manifold arguments. After a compelling introduction that outlines the place of the Peruvian agrarian reform within the history of Latin America's political transformations and the importance of a regional or subnational perspective for understanding, testing, and deconstructing national narratives, the first chapter, “The History of the Land Question in Peru,” offers one of the best genealogies of this country's rural struggles—from the deep origins of colonial dispossession and displacement to the number of twentieth-century proposals for reinventing and recasting the “land question.” Chapter 2, “SINAMOS: Promoting the Revolution in the Regions,” introduces one of the book's central actors: the National System of Support of Social Mobilization, Velasco's propaganda engine for his peculiar revolution. An acronym that conveyed the central message of the agrarian reform (sin amos, without masters), SINAMOS and its regional networks allowed Velasco's reform to have an everyday presence in nearly every corner of the country—although this presence was remarkably contested. “Education for Social Change: The Making of the Campesino Citizen,” the third chapter, highlights the importance of educational and political literacies to agrarian reform. In promoting unprecedented forms of education, however, the military regime also nourished regional forms of dissent. The following chapter, “The Agrarian Reform in Public Discourse,” discusses one of the most intriguing features of this process: a mass media discourse, deeply rhetorical and highly visual, on reform's envisioned impact. Despite this discourse's hegemony, the public presentation of the regime's agrarian visions also engendered regional opposition. Finally, “The Agrarian Reform in Historical Memory,” the last substantial chapter, joins an emerging transdisciplinary literature focused on explaining how the agrarian reform is remembered as both a truly transformative experience and a massive example of failed state sociopolitical, cultural, and economic intervention.Cant's achievements are vast and profound. Unveiling the cultural dimensions of the agrarian reform, not only as a source of renewed national historical narratives but also as an educational endeavor that promoted genuinely radical forms of literacy, provides a new understanding of this process. The regional sensibility of the text is very vivid, and nearly every chapter effortlessly moves from the national to the subnational, giving readers a remarkably compelling ethnographic texture. The use of usually overlooked military sources—such as Actualidad Militar, the Peruvian army's institutional journal—is formidable. The interviews with historical actors pivotal in the making of the reform also provide depth and context to many of the ideas discussed throughout the book. Without major shortcomings, the book does leave two intriguing points for further research. Cant pays little attention to the twentieth-century origins of rural communities constituted as comunidades indígenas in 1920 or the attempt to establish granjas comunales in the 1940s, seemingly important departure points for discussing the narratives that led to the 1969 agrarian reform. The author also seems to confer a certain decompressing capacity to national agrarian reform, mechanically linking the presence or absence of these processes to subsequent political violence (p. 184).Land without Masters is more than a welcome contribution to the field. Cant offers an in-depth analysis, compellingly theoretical and captivatingly narrative, of Peru's most important sociopolitical, economic, and cultural turning point. A new agrarian history of Peru and Latin America begins here.