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Agrarian reform agencies and national land registry systems in the Pan Amazon

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Rural real estate markets in the Pan Amazon are regulated by institutions that are a legacy of the agrarian reform movements that played a prominent role in domestic politics during the last half of the twentieth century. Prior to World War II, the region was characterised by a quasi-feudal land tenure system, with ownership concentrated among affluent families of European extraction. In Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, large estates were dependent on the labour of Indigenous peasants (campesinos) with ancestral ties to the land, while in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, the rural labor force was composed of individuals with a contractual relationship with the landowner. The states of the Guiana coast were in the early stages of post-colonial rule, and the relationship between landlord and tenant was in a state of flux, but landless peasants were the majority in an economic system that was overwhelmingly rural. This inherent inequality was a political tinderbox that was exacerbated by the expanded influence of Marxist philosophies and the explosion of radical movements after Fidel Castro consolidated the Cuban Revolution. Governments throughout the region responded by enacting agrarian reform legislation. Unsurprisingly, these policies were unpopular with conservative elites seeking to protect their financial patrimony. The decades following the Cuban Revolution were dominated by military governments; these governments varied in their adhesion to the principles of genuine agrarian reform, but all seized upon a solution originally championed by Abraham Lincoln: colonise public lands on the frontier. Distributing public lands in wilderness areas was popular; better yet,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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