Backgrounder Part I :The Agrarian Question in Guatemala
January 13, 2003
Part 1 of this paper discusses the history of land reform efforts in Guatemala and gives an overview of the political struggles for land.
Land Research Action Network
Country Background Paper, 2002
The Agrarian Question in Guatemala
Laura Saldivar Tanaka and Hannah Wittman
Land Research Action Network (LRAN)
On May 6, 1996, the Guatemalan Government, the General Command of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, and a United Nations representative signed a comprehensive “Agreement on Social and Economic Aspects and the Agrarian Situation” (ASESA) as a subtext of the Peace Accords that placed an official end to the 36 year civil war. Negotiations over the accord involved the government, representatives of the guerrilla forces, and representatives from civil society, and represented a landmark attempt to redirect and restructure approaches to Guatemala's longstanding “land problem”-thus responding to the “agrarian question.” However, the 1996 Agreement has failed to really address the issues of rural poverty and landlessness which are the product of one of the most inequitable systems of land distribution and tenure in the world.
Two other components of the Peace Accords, the “Accord on Indigenous People's Identity and Rights” and the “Accord on Resettlement of Displaced Populations” also address land issues. The Accord on Indigenous People's Identity and Rights emphasizes the duty to provide state land to indigenous communities, eliminate gender discrimination for land allocation, and promotes measures to regularize the legal situation of communal tenure. The Resettlement accord reiterates the government's commitment to rural development and obligates the government to solve land disputes generated during the war and to identify land for resettlement (Hernández, 2000).
HISTORY
Guatemala's land tenure system has roots in the Spanish conquest, when land was expropriated from the indigenous populations and given as a reward to the new colonizers. After independence in 1821, land tenure in Guatemala remained highly unequal. In 1825, the first agrarian law was passed; “to increase the amount of public-domain land transferred to private ownership, ” under the premise that highly unequal land distribution, concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, was the cause of the country's underdevelopment (Thiesenhusen, 1995).
During the administrations of Miguel Garcia Granados (1871-1873) and Liberal General Justo Rufino Barrios(1873-1885), further indigenous landholdings were expropriated (Hernández, 1998). Rufino Barrios completed the settlement of Guatemala's highlands, established incentives and infrastructure needed by coffee growers, and made strategic adjustments to land tenure. Public land on the southern coast was sold. Under the new reform, legal status was removed from massive landholdings of the Church and communally- held indigenous land. Communal land tenure almost disappeared and a land market was fostered, based on the argument that there was an urgent need to augment the number of land owners, introduce new crops for export, and open new areas for agricultural exploitation (Thiesenhusen, 1995; Hernández, 1998). Export crop growers forced indigenous villagers to relocate at higher altitudes-- land characterized by a climate too cold and marginal for milpa, the favored crop combination (corn and beans). By 1890, coffee made up 96% of Guatemala's exports. Meanwhile, the campesino sector stagnated, limited by its consignment to ever-poorer land, and foodstuffs came to be imported. Many highland growers subsequently bought land on the south coast to be able to diversify into tropical crops. Campesinos then had to migrate from the highland to the coast in search of wage labor (Thiesenhusen, 1995).
The Agrarian Law of 1894 allowed the sale of state land to individuals of up to 678 hectares. Until 1921, hundreds of thousands of hectares were given to about 3,600 people (Hernández, 1998: b). In 1901, the United Fruit Company (UFC), today known as Chiquita, began operations in the lowland tropics of Guatemala, and by 1924, the Guatemalan government had ceded large tracts of land for the company's use. Land was given on 25-99 year leases. UFC paid a tiny tax on exports, its imports and profits were exempt from Guatemalan taxes, and it was not obliged to obey labor legislation. As Thiesenhusen (1995: 73) puts it, “the relationship between the Company and the county's landed gentry became close and cooperative.”
In 1931,the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico began initially with full support from the US. In the 40's, however, the US began to support Juan Jose Arévalo, Ubico's nationalistic opponent. Arévalo became president in 1945, establishing a new constitution that provided for the “social property of land” and called for the eradication of latifundios (at this time the twenty-two biggest latifundistas owned more land than 249,169 peasant families) (Handy, 1998: 102) . A titling law (Ley de Titulación Suplementaria) was passed, providing that squatters who farmed land for ten years could obtain title to it (Thiesenhusen, 1995: 75).
The Arbenz Reform
Arévalo's legislation, and the increasing prominence of worker and campesino organizations during the period of 1944-1954 laid the foundation for the reform program of Jacobo Arbenz, who was elected president in 1951.
Arbenz vowed to “convert Guatemala into a modern capitalist nation through industrialization and land reform” . Faced with a land distribution in which the 88% of farming units at or below subsistence level held only 14% of agricultural land, and in which the average large landowner cultivated only 19% of his personal holdings, on June 17, 1952, the Guatemalan Congress approved the Agrarian Reform Law, Decree 900. The main objectives of the Decree were to: (1) eliminate feudal states; (2) obliterate all forms of indentured servitude; (3) provide land to the landless and land-poor; and (4) distribute credit and technical assistance to smallholders. The new reform provided land- holding limits for expropriation (Thiesenhusen, 1995).
Between 1953 and 1954, approximately 1002 decrees of expropriation were issued, affecting 603,615 hectares of land,
in addition to the redistribution of 280,000 hectares of state farms. An estimated 78,038 and 100,000 families benefited respectively. Between 33-40% of rural households and 31-40% of the landless labor force received at least some land from the Arbenz reform, in parcels ranging from 3.5 to 17.5 hectares
(.
The reform was carried out through the expropriation of idle land and redistribution of uncultivated state farmland. Only uncultivated holdings larger than 90 hectares were available for expropriation, and farms between 90-270 hectares which were at least two-thirds cultivated were exempt, as were farms engaged in cash-crop cultivation.
Land expropriated from private owners was compensated by beneficiaries giving 5% of the value of crops harvested to the government; beneficiaries of state land received land with lifetime usufruct rights, and paid a rental fee of 3% of production. The state indemnization for expropriated land was based on the self-declared value for tax purposes as of May 1952 ; ; .
Opposition to the Arbenz regime and the land reform enactment, however, was swift and decisive, ending the reform on June 27th, 1954, with the overthrow of Arbenz by Colonel Castillo Armas. The “top-down” reform was opposed by landed elites, the Catholic Church, the middle-class business sector, and foreign plantation owners,
in addition to expropriated landowners. These actors disputed the rapidity of the reform, the price paid in indemnization, the lack of participation of landowners in the Agrarian Committees, and a provision of Decree 900 which stipulated the total expropriation without indemnization of land owned by those who opposed the reform by violent or subversive means (Hough et al 1982, 43-5; Thiesenhusen,1995).
Pressure from the United States government to ”ward off the Communist threat” while protecting the interests of US companies (i.e. United Fruit) facilitated a military coup backed by the CIA, and a complete reversal of the agrarian transformation attempted by the Arbenz regime. In the first six months after the coup, the majority of land expropriations were annulled, and the land returned to the previous owners. No additional land expropriations have occurred in Guatemala since 1954, cementing the system of inequitable land distribution that Thiesenhusen (1995) cites as the fundamental cause of war over the next thirty-five years.
Forster (1998) argues that the 1952 reform “destroyed the hegemony of the agro-export elite” (199), who then proceeded to regain and preserve their rule through violence and repression during the next 40 years. The support of the United States and international institutions promoting Guatemala's focus on agricultural exports for the world market also served to cement the “political lesson of 1954” as a warning against further discussion of redistribution. FAO (1998) asserts that a top-down redistributive land reform involving expropriation requires exclusive control of political power by the government, and the transfer or elimination of the power of the existing rural, land-based elite in order to succeed; neither of these conditions have existed in Guatemala in the 20th century (4). The reversal of the 1952 reform can be viewed as a short-lived experimental ”moment” within a historical context of the consolidation of power of the landed few vis-à-vis the state and the potential beneficiaries.
Three Decades of Dictatorship
According to Nairn (1983 in Thiesenhusen, 1995: 80), from 1960 to 1980 “the Guatemalan GNP grew more than 5% annually, yet... peasants' living standards declined.” During this period “two economic growth strategies were attempted... both omitted the peasantry. One emphasized export diversification, the other promotion of the Central American Common Market (CACM)” (80). The situation of the country's poor worsened, and land concentration increased most markedly between the 1950s and 1970s in Guatemala, more than in any other Central American country. These export booms in Guatemala have historically benefited large commercial farms and displaced small farms.
As Thiesenhusen (1995) points out, “in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered subversive to even speak of land reform, but in the economically depressed 1980s, as civil war deepened and violence escalated, there came renewed public calls for structural agrarian changes” (85).
1996 Agreement-Background and Promises
After the return to civilian government in 1986, a march of 16,000 landless workers to the National Palace in Guatemala City set the stage for the return of agrarian issues to the Guatemalan political agenda . Although there were more strikes, protests, and land invasions in the first three years of civilian government than in the previous thirty years, President Victor Cerezo refused to propose land reform .
The National Campesino Association (ANC) grew to 115,000 by 1988, but based on its commitment to “nonviolence and the market economy,” only called upon the government to purchase available farms and turn them over to peasant cooperatives.
Beginning in 1995, the CUC (Committee of Campesino Unity) and CONIC (National Coordinator of Indigenous and Campesinos) increased political activity and began a program of land invasions to dramatize the land issue and to force official response to their demands. Brocket (1998) credits this increased social mobilization for putting land reform back onto the agenda of the 1996 Peace Accords.
The Agreement recognizes that social exclusion of the indigenous and campesino rural populations and the concentration of resources have been historical phenomena resulting in a lack of social services and development opportunities, impeding development and a lasting peace . The key government objectives outlined in the Agreement are described in Box 1.
The language of the Agreement was the product of lengthy negotiations between the various constituent groups including the National Coordination of Campesino Organizations (CNOC). CNOC's demands included guarantees of land ownership for the poor, fulfillment of human rights agreements including the demilitarization of the countryside, technical and financial support reflecting a Mayan world view, and reform of state institutions and the Constitution. CNOC also re-introduced the idea of “social property,” used to advocate the recovery and protection of communal and other indigenous and campesino lands expropriated since 1955. This idea, supporting state expropriation of idle lands, challenged the 1955 and 1985 constitutional definitions of “private property” upheld by every government since 1954.
Campesino and human rights organizations argue that the attempts to create an Agreement that would effect structural changes in current land tenure arrangements were diluted by pressure from the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF), who actively opposed the idea of social property. Instead, CACIF advocated the privatization of communal and municipal lands and a “more rational and efficient use of the land to reflect Guatemala's comparative advantage in the new global economy” . Ultimately, the Coordination of Organizations of Mayan Peoples (COPMAGUA) had the sharpest critique, stating that “this agenda breathes fresh life into structures inherited from the colonial period, and fails to challenge the overriding interests of large landowners” .
Land Distribution
Guatemala's rural populations suffer from one of the most unequal land distributions in Latin America. Less than 1% of landowners hold 75% of the best agricultural land,
90% of rural inhabitants live in poverty, and over 500,000 campesino families live below subsistence level .
At the same time, Guatemala has one of the most historically stable rural populations in Latin America, currently comprising 69% of the population, while over half of all laborers are engaged in agriculture (FAO, 1988).
The historical consolidation and expropriation of indigenous lands has had serious consequences for sustainable land use, smallholder self-sufficiency, food security, and health.
In some areas, land pressures no longer allow traditional practices of shifting cultivation, and intensive cultivation practices on marginal land have led to severe soil erosion, lower yields, and dependence on seasonal and permanent migration for remittances to support family income needs.
In addition to problems related to distributional inequity, Guatemala's skewed land regime also “results in credit, loans, and other resources being channeled disproportionately to urban areas and the agro-export sector, and to chronic under-investment in the countryside” .
The most widely accepted statistics on land distribution in Guatemala are based on data collected from the 1979 Agricultural Census. Hough, et al. (1982) report a widely skewed 1979 land distribution in which 88% of productive farm units were less than family subsistence size, holding 16% of arable land, while 2% of units held 65% of arable land
(See Table 1). While there have apparently been few reliable studies since 1979, the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture and Food (MAGA) estimates that in 1998 approximately 96% of farm units overall fell into the subsistence or below subsistence categories, holding 20% of agricultural land .
The World Bank (WB 1996, 27) cites a CACIF study as evidence for the assertion that concentration is reversing in some areas on the southern coast, but most other analyses suggest that farmland in Guatemala has become more concentrated, not less, over time. Between 1964 and 1979 (despite colonization and market-based reform programs discussed later in this paper), the number of farms under 3.5 ha doubled, and the average farm size among those with less than 7 ha fell from 2.4 ha to 1.8 ha between 1950 and 1979 ; FAO Annex II, 1988; ; . Stringer and Lambert (1989) attribute increasing concentration of land in Guatemala (in addition to population growth) to a monopolistic land ownership structure, an “excessively bureaucratic and expensive land registration process, and lack of credit for land purchases” (5). In addition, predatory land consolidation has occurred via the mis-implementation of several agrarian laws described in the historical section below.
Table 1. Land distribution in Guatemala: 1950, 1964, 1979 (in percentages)
Number of farms
|
Area
|
Size
|
1950
|
1964
|
1979
|
1950
|
1964
|
1979
|
Less than 0.7 ha
|
21.30
|
20.39
|
31.36
|
0.77
|
0.95
|
1.33
|
.7 to 1.4 ha
|
26.26
|
23.64
|
22.83
|
2.54
|
2.77
|
2.75
|
1.4 to 3.5 ha
|
28.62
|
30.94
|
24.19
|
5.70
|
7.85
|
6.40
|
3.5 to 7 ha
|
12.17
|
12.47
|
9.74
|
5.32
|
7.04
|
5.74
|
7 to 22.4 ha
|
7.72
|
8.87
|
7.6
|
8.36
|
12.95
|
11.91
|
22.4 to 44.8 ha
|
1.76
|
1.59
|
1.72
|
5.10
|
5.90
|
6.77
|
44.8 to 450 ha
|
1.86
|
1.88
|
2.31
|
21.86
|
26.53
|
30.66
|
450 to 900 ha
|
.16
|
.13
|
.17
|
9.52
|
10.03
|
12.81
|
900 to 2,250 ha
|
.10
|
.07
|
.07
|
13.32
|
11.22
|
12.00
|
2250 to 4500 ha
|
.03
|
.01
|
.01
|
8.81
|
4.92
|
|
|
|
