In 1969, a group of self-claimed radical military officers led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, aided by able technocrats and a favorable hemispheric context, unleashed the last comprehensive agrarian reform of twentieth-century Latin America. After a coup and through a combination of an allegedly emancipatory discourse and authoritarian means, the purportedly radical generals aimed to transform the material foundations of the country by dismantling the hacienda system and empowering the campesinado, the disenfranchised mass of rural Indigenous peasants in the countryside. Until the publication of Land without Masters, the entangled history of this agrarian reform remained largely unaddressed by historians. Deploying a combination of methodologies—including regional archive research, oral histories, and visual analysis, among others—Anna Cant offers us a comprehensive analysis of the precedents, making, unmaking, and legacies of General Velasco's foremost experiment. Grounding her analysis on three distinctive regions of Peru, Cant convincingly shows how the reach...

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