THE LEGACY OF LATIN AMERICAN LAND REFORM
There is no general formula to start and effectively execute major land reforms; rather, it must evolve and adapt according to the complex economic and political dynamics that characterize a particular country at a given time.
By Solon L. Barraclough
At the dawn of the twentieth century, traditional indigenous systems had been eliminated or subordinated everywhere in the western hemisphere, and two broad systems of agrarian relations co-existed. On the one hand, bi-modal latifundia systems––so-called because of the interaction between the large latifundia estates and small peasant holdings––dominated most of Latin America, the Caribbean and much of the southern United States. The latifundia were typically worked by indentured or slave labor, or by nearby small (minifundia) cultivators in return for token wages and access to some of the estates’ resources. On the other hand, family farm-based systems were predominant in most of the rest of the United States, Canada and a few small regions in Latin America
