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Land Reform and Agrarian Revolution in El Salvador: Comment on Seligson and Diskin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Jeffery M. Paige
Jeffery M. Paige*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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The causes as well as the consequences of land reform are revolutionary. Land reform is not really reform at all. In an agrarian society, land reform is a revolutionary act because it redistributes the major source of wealth, social standing, and political power. Successful large-scale land reforms in Latin America and elsewhere occur only during social revolution or through the actions of invading armies imposing revolution from above. The land reforms in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, and Nicaragua occurred during revolutions; the land reforms in Japan and Taiwan were imposed by invading armies. The reform in South Korea apparently represented a combination of the two. Fundamental land reform without social transformation is a logical and practical impossibility. This is the reason why land reform as a counterrevolutionary strategy, such as the ill-fated “land-to-the-tiller” program attempted in Vietnam, is bound to fail.

Type
Commentary and Debate
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , 1996 , pp. 127 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

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