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Bolivia, pioneer of agrarian reform in South America | Chapter 4 of “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon”

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Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising against the feudal system that bound Indigenous communities to estates owned by wealthy families. The revolutionary government created the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) in 1958 to provide legal status to the lands occupied and claimed by Indigenous peasants. The revolution largely occurred in the Andean highlands and eventually led to the proliferation of extremely small (micro) landholdings that motivated many campesinos to migrate to urban areas or the eastern lowlands. Large estates in the Bolivian Amazon avoided confiscation but their owners were forced to bequeath a fraction of their properties to the Indigenous communities upon which they depended for labour. In 1965, Bolivia established the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC) to foster the migration to the lowlands and, in the process, created a parallel and overlapping bureaucracy for granting land titles. Both agencies distributed land in the Bolivian Amazon to the growing stream of Indigenous migrants from the Andean highlands. Organised colonisation projects in the 1970s created smallholder landscapes in the Chapare, Cochabamba (Human Modified Landscape or HML #32); Alto Beni, La Paz (HML #33); and San Julián, Santa Cruz (HML #31). Japanese immigrants also arrived in the 1960s and established colonies in Santa Cruz at Yapacaní (HML #32) and Okinawa (HML #31), landscapes with unusually fertile soils uniquely suited for the cultivation of irrigated rice. Mennonites settled…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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