The agrarian reform process in Peru began in 1964. Originally a cautious effort targeting the more egregious examples of peasant exploitation, it was dramatically expanded by a left-wing military government in 1969. Between 1970 and 1975, more than 15,800 landholdings, covering slightly more than nine million hectares, were confiscated and redistributed to more than 370,000 campesino families. The original owners were to be compensated by the sale of sovereign bonds, but hyperinflation in the 1980s forced the government into default and the outstanding debt continues to be the object of legal action. The original plan by the military government was to form producer-owned collectives that empowered communities to assume control of their land while preserving the economies of scale. This idea was not embraced by the peasants, however, who divided the land among themselves while managing tenure communally according to traditional highland customs. The military regime ended in 1980 with the election of Fernando Belaunde, an advocate of Amazonian development and the original proponent of the Carretera Marginal de la Selva. Among his first actions was to create the Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo (INADE), an autonomous agency affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture; INADE organized Proyectos Especiales, which included settlements in the tropical lowlands, irrigation systems on the coast and mechanized agriculture in the highlands. The six lowland projects were analogous to the colonization projects in Brazil that distributed land adjacent to highways then under construction, largely, as in Bolivia, to Indigenous migrants from the Andean highlands. The piedmont between…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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