GUATEMALA: Reformed Land Reform

To Guatemala’s backlands, torn by bitter years of a Communist-written land reform that set peasant against landholder, last week came a quietly revolutionary reform of the reform. Going well beyond the vague notion that landless Indians “ought” to have some of the big estates held by a few families, President Carlos Castillo Armas’ decree aimed at raising the agricultural health of all Guatemala.

The reform begun in 1952 by Red-led President Jacobo Arbenz actually moved 87,000 peasant families onto plots of their own. Some legally took over uncultivated parts of confiscated estates; more, inflamed by the example, simply seized land amid scenes of bloodshed and destruction. After Castillo Armas took power, many landlords grabbed back their holdings with equal violence. The bulk of the 1,950,000 indifferent, largely illiterate Indians stayed unbenefited on their subsistence corn patches high in the mountains.

The new law, written with the advice of U.S. farm experts, makes many changes. Recognizing that one good solution is to get the landless mountain peasants onto fertile, government-owned lowlands (which can grow three crops of corn a year), it tempts them with homesteads at low prices. Recognizing also the popular demand for land redistribution, it provides for the well-compensated expropriation of idle parts of big estates and their division among the landless. The new plan offers technical assistance, credit, housing and “fundamental agrarian education” aimed at turning the withdrawn Indians into cash-crop farmers and cash-spending consumers. In contrast to the Arbenz regime’s land reform decree, which retained a lien on government-issued land (to keep beneficiaries voting the right way), the new law gives outright possession. To prevent estate owners from buying their land right back, it forbids resale for 25 years without government consent.

Land reform will be financed as part of a fiveyear, $250 million economic development program announced by Castillo Armas last week as Guatemala put its new constitution and Congress into formal operation. The U.S. may supply a fifth of the total sum, has already contributed $2,400,000 toward land resettlement. But other land reform funds will come from a tax that may prove to be the most revolutionary part of the law. The tax applies to untilled parts of large farms, and increases by 25% every year — up to five years —that the land is left unproductive. Though low (top rate: $1.25 per hectare — 2.47 acres — the first year), the tax strikes hard at the principle of holding land not for farming but as an inflation-proof investment.