Posts com a Tag ‘Estado Rural’

The question of agrarian reform in Latin America has recently resurfaced as a topic of historical inquiry. In this context of renewed attention to the political nature of land reform, scholars have begun to ask: which land reform was the most radical? While the success of Mexico’s agrarian reform has been hotly contested for decades, gains from Guatemala’s reform were reversed after the 1954 coup, and Cuba’s 1959 land reform suddenly appears less radical when paired against the 1969 agrarian reform that cooperativized land in Peru. Bolivia’s 1953 land reform has seldom been interpreted as more transformational, far-reaching, or long-lasting than these or other Latin American examples. But Carmen Soliz’s methodically researched book, Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964, seems to suggest just that.

Standard depictions of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution have regarded its agrarian reform law as either incomplete or a failure. Indeed, when Cuban revolutionaries embarked on their own project of agrarian reform in 1959, they looked to the Mexican and Bolivian cases for inspiration but concluded that neither had been successful enough to elicit emulation. The scholarship on Bolivia’s 1952 revolution, moreover, has continued to interpret Bolivia’s agrarian reform as limited, top-down, and applied in a clientelist manner. Soliz’s book overturns those conceptions and brings to light an entirely different reality, one forged in the highlands of rural Bolivia, where peasants expanded the limits of the agrarian reform law, won a new future for themselves, and changed the outlook of Bolivian politics. Leia Mais