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Las iniciativas campesinas y la sostenibilidad de los resultados de la reforma agraria en el salvador, nicaragua y honduras
Baumeister, Eduardo
Baumeister, Eduardo
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Baumeister, Eduardo
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Abstract
"The agrarian reforms considered in this study in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua took place during the great expansion in agricultural exports (cotton, sugar cane, African palm, coffee, bananas and cattle) from Central America between the 1950s and the late 1970s. Permanent or seasonal agricultural workers constituted the main social groups exerting pressure for reform. The agrarian transformations propelled by reform were concentrated in export-related activities. As a result, new forms of organization of the labour process emerged: state-owned enterprises with some degree of direct and participatory management by the workers, or associations based on co-operative property and management. The governmental coalitions that launched agrarian reforms had heterogeneous goals, including control of rural unrest; decrease of the power of landed elites; and creation of an agrarian basis for the transition to socialism supported by socialist countries. In all cases, workers and farmers initiatives depended upon other social groups, in spite of their own capacity to exert pressure and mobilize people. According to data from the mid-1990s, one fourth of rural families and one third of total land area were affected by land reform in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In Honduras, reform had an impact on a smaller proportion of the population, but some of the initiatives originating there relating to the production of bananas and African palm, in particular constituted the most striking examples of associative enterprises in agrarian reforms in Latin America. By the mid-1980s, agrarian reforms implemented in the 1970s and early 1980s were being affected by structural adjustment policies and an increased role for market mechanisms the formation of land markets in particular. Furthermore, the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s were marked by deep political changes from which emerged subsequent revolutionary processes. Following civil war in the 1990s, both El Salvador and Nicaragua gave land to insurgents and demobilized soldiers. Simultaneously, beneficiaries of earlier reforms lost control of their land; physical capital (machinery, irrigation equipment, etc.) deteriorated rapidly; and access to bank credit for development and technical assistance fell significantly. In response to this unfavourable situation, diverse strategies were pursued at the national, regional, departmental and local levels. Many of the strategies adopted revealed the weaknesses of the land reform processes, such as the lack of participation of beneficiaries in the management of production units and the predominance of paid rural workers rather than self-managed entrepreneurs."(pg ii)
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1999-06
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With permission of the license/copyright holder