“Land to Those Who Work It”

“Lands to the Indian, Mines to the State” was first put forth as a slogan by the socialist writer Tristán Marof in 1926 and gained ground after the Chaco War, capturing revolutionary aspirations to recast society and economy. The calls for agrarian reform from the left accompanied the growing levels of organization and mobilization in the countryside during the 1930s and 1940s. When the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (mnr) came to power in April 1952, it sought to cement an alliance with the rural sector which, according to the 1950 census, still represented 73 percent of the population. Only a few months after the triumphant insurrection, the government created the Ministry of Peasant Affairs, and the number of peasant unions rapidly multiplied, some with “armed regiments.” The mnr initially intended to reform the servile labor regime but not to challenge large capitalist estates. But the direct action of peons on haciendas as well as Indian reclamation of communal lands pushed the government to pass a more radical law for the redistribution of property. It was the second major agrarian reform in Latin America, after Mexico’s, which had unfolded both more slowly and with greater violence.

The first peasant unions had emerged in Cochabamba in the Ucureña area, in 1936. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro returned to the same location on 2 August 1953, to promulgate the Agrarian Reform Decree, in Spanish with oral translations in Quechua and Aymara. The announcement was met with the warm applause of the hardened hands of about one hundred thousand peasants and indigenous people who had arrived from all over the country for the historic occasion. (The 2nd of August had been declared the “Day of the Indian” in 1937, in honor of the foundation of the Warisata ayllu-school in 1931, and also coincided with the anniversary of the death of the independence soldier and Quechua poet Juan Wallparimachi in 1815.) This measure, together with others for universal suffrage and public education, went further than independence in 1825 or any subsequent event to incorporate the peasant and indigenous majority into the Bolivian nation.

The eleven prefatory clauses that follow reflect the general spirit of the decree. The first two foundational articles establish national ownership of natural resources, the priority of national public interest over private property, and reaffrm the 1938 Constitution’s stipulation that private property fulfill a social function. Other important articles declare an end to the “feudal” estate (latifundio); guarantee lands for dispossessed indigenous communities, former hacienda workers, and all who wished to undertake new cultivation; promote peasant unionization; and confirm the abolition of rural servitude, which had first been decreed by the Gualberto Villarroel government in 1945.