Changes in Rural Class Structure Under the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

The significance of Peru's agrarian reform continues to be sharply debated. There are still a few scholars and political groups who insist that the program, launched in 1969 and largely completed in 1976, has in no way altered what they regard as the underlying semifeudal character of Peruvian society. The essay below is in part a response to those who dogmatically cling to this view. On the other hand, sympathizers of the military regime tend to exaggerate the sweep of the land reform and its impact on Peruvian society. In an earlier issue of Latin American Perspectives, Jose Marfa Caballero outlined the design and immediate impact of the program in considerable detail, pointing out that some of the land reform's political characteristics operated against its supposed economic goals [Sobre el caracter de la reforma agraria 1977 (Summer), 146-159]. He showed that only about 22 percent of Peru's rural work force benefited substantially from the land distribution, and, at the same time, he doubted that the program would advance very far toward development of an expanding and productive capitalist agriculture which some of its architects had envisioned. Instead, he foresaw an acceleration of tendencies already pronounced before the reform: growing semiproletarianization of the peasantry, gradual destruction of natural economy, greater dependence of even the poorest peasants on the capitalist market, and continuing centralization in those areas of agriculture already capitalist. But beyond specific economic consequences is a broader social and political context which Rodrigo Montoya addresses below. His essay is taken from a larger work, La izquierda y la reforma agraria peruana, tres cuestiones fundamentales, originally written in 1975 and circulated in Peru in two pamphlet editions under a pseudonym. The original essay went on to address two issues which follow logically from changes in Peru's rural class structure: to what extent have the class-structure tendencies outlined below brought about changes in class struggle?; and what are the political (i.e., revolutionary) implications of these changes for the future? The second edition of Montoya's study was accompanied by an interesting critique of its theses by the Cfrculo de Estudios Artemio Zavala dated February 1977. While recognizing the correctness of Montoya's overall perspective, the Circulo argued that the author evidenced a measure of economism in neglecting an analysis of new forms of political domination which accompany state control of agriculture; underestimating the residual power which the expropriated classes (feudal and capitalist) maintain in the superstructure even after loss of their material base; overemphasizing (as causation) the economic disintegration of traditional precapitalist forms as *The author, Rodrigo Montoya Rojas, teaches in the Departamento de Ciencias Hist6ricosociales at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. The translator, teaches in the Department of Political Science, Purdue University

Agrarian reform · Agrarian society · Agrarian structure · Agriculture · Class (philosophy) · Economic system · Economics · Geography · Land reform · Political science · Socioeconomics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Latin American rural development · Latin American socio-political dynamics · Philosophy

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