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The Peasantry and the Development of Sandinista Agrarian Policy, 1979-1984

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Carmen Diana Deere ,
Peter Marchetti  and
Nola Reinhardt
Carmen Diana Deere
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Peter Marchetti
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios de la Reforma Agraria, Managua
Nola Reinhardt
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , 1985 , pp. 75 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this article, entitled “Agrarian Reform and the Transition to Socialism in Nicaragua: 1979-1983,” was presented to the Northeast Universities Development Conference, held at Harvard University, 27-28 April 1984. The article has benefited considerably from the comments and criticisms of the anonymous LARR reviewers and other colleagues too numerous to mention. Any errors are our own.

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