Land Reform and the El Salvador Crisis

Land Refom and the El Salvador Crisbl Roy L. Prosteman Jeffrey M. Riedinger M U ~ N . Temple IF r o m the perspectives of our urban and industrialized society it is easy to lose sight of the fundamental fact that approximately sixty percent of the earth’s population is still counted as ”rural,” and that roughly half the human beings on our planet still make their living from agriculture. In less-developed societies, the relationship to agricultural land typically represents the chief source of livelihood , assurance, and status for most of the population. It is not, therefore, surprising that widely held grievancesover inadequacies in that relationship may shake the foundations of social order. It is in such widely held grievances by peasants over their relationship to land that there is found, most pointedly, the truth of Robert McNamara’s observation that “security is development,” and of John Kennedy’s famous comment, that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” The land-related grievancesthat are most likely to give rise to violenceare those most clearly associated with action by a human agent-those relating to collection of onerous rents or to threatened eviction by a landlord, for example, rather than those relating to inferior seed, the absence of credit mechanisms, or the vagaries of weather. In fact, the most acute of these land-related grievances, and those most likely to precipitate violence, appear to be those of the peasants who do not own much or most of the land which they farm, that is, those who earn their living largely or exclusively as tenants, sharecroppers, or agricultural laborers. These landless peasants have provided the rank and file support for most of the great twentiethxentury revolutions--those, in particular, of Mexico, Russia, China, and Vietnam. They have played a similar role in many lesser bloodlettings, such as the revolutions in Cuba, Ethiopia, and Bolivia, and the failed insurgencies in Kenya, Malaya, and the Philippines. The problems of Roy L. Prosterman is Professor of Law at the University of Washington.He has conducted field work on development issues in some 17 countries, including South Vietnam and El Salvador. JeffreyRiedinger is a Research Associate at the University of Washington Law School. Mary N. Temple is Executive Director of the Land Council, a New York-based organization promoting rural progress in developing countries. 1. Population Reference Bureau, 1980 World Population Data Sheet. 2. For purposes of this article ”landless”will refer to all of these groups, as members of each are without ownershipof much or most of the land on which they work. ~~ International Security, Summer1981 (Vol. 6,No.1) 0162-2889/81/010053-22$02.50/0 @ 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 53 Znternational Security I 54 landlessness have been heavily implicated in many other episodes of upheaval and civil strife, ranging from the civil war in Spain to the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. Indeed, one of the authors suggested some years ago that, based on the past experience, one might predict a ”’substantial danger’of major revolution for any country 3 0 percent or more of whose total population consisted of landless peasants . . .; and a ‘criticaldanger‘ where that percentage reached 40.” Illustrative of the pre-upheaval percentages of landless people to total population are the following: Pre-1911 Mexico ................................. Pre-1917 Russia .................................. Pre-1941 China (rice region only) .................. Pre-1952 Bolivia .................................. Pre-1959 Cuba ................................... Pre-1961 South Vietnam .......................... Pre-1979 Iran .................................... Re-1980 El Salvador Pre-1975 Ethiopia ................................ Pre-1979 Nicaragua ............................... .............................. 62 percent 3247 percent4 3545 percent 60 percent 39 percent 42-58 percent 60 percent 35 percent over 38 percent 38 percent By contrast, predictionsof the presence of vulnerability to major upheaval, even for some contemporary societies with what appear to be substantial problems of poverty or oppression, have not been vindicated thus far under circumstances where the proportion of landless people is much smaller: Haiti ............................................ under 23 percent Thailand ......................................... 17-23 percent Panama ......................................... under 12percent Post-refonn Bolivia ............................... 4 percent5 3 . Prosterman, Roy. L.,“’1RI’-A Simplified Predictive Index of Rural Instability,” in Cornparative Politics,339 at 343 (April, 1976). 4 . Where the data show substantial...