DE LA HACIENDA PUBLICA, PROGRAMACION Y DEL DESARROLLO URBANO Y RURAL

This thesis ultimately seeks to determine what role if any a significant and wide- reaching land reform policy will have in resolving Colombia's persistent rural conflict. Those who propose land reform as a “prescription” for rural insurgency argue, “The greater the misdistribution of land, the greater the probability of mass-based political insurgency.”2 The “land reform hypothesis” further stipulates that until land reform is adequately implemented, insurgency will persist and perhaps even lead to the overthrow of the state.3 In the aftermath of the Second World War, no other nation embraced and advocated the merits of land reform more than the United States. In the broader national security strategy of “containment,” U.S. policymakers frequently used land reform as a foreign policy instrument to counter the potential Communist exploitation and mobilization of “peasant discontent,” particularly in East Asia.4 _{Consequently, the United States would} become the leading force behind land reform in post-war Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The subsequent “success story” of the modernization and eventual democratization of these three countries has been attributed to these initial land reform policies.

While land reform became the policy de jour in East Asia, it was not so eagerly embraced by the United States for Latin America, at least initially. In 1954, the

1 _{Huntington, Samuel P. Political Order in Changing Societies. ( Yale University Press: New Haven,}

1968), 292.

2 _{Muller, Edward N. and Mitchell A. Seligson. “Inequality and Insurgency.” [Electronic version]}

American Political Science Review, 81.2, (June 1987), 425.

3 _{Goodwin, Jeff. No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991. (Cambridge}

University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2001), 229.

4 _{Louis J. Walinsky, ed. The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky: Agrarian Reform as Unfinished}

Eisenhower administration covertly supported the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who had earned the opposition of both Guatemala's powerful landed oligarchy and the U.S. owned United Fruit Company, by implementing an aggressive land reform policy. However, the successful Cuban revolution of 1958 would cause the United States to reevaluate land reform’s applicability for Latin America. Consequently, land reform would become a cornerstone of the United States led Latin American development plan called the Alliance for Progress (1961-1968). Halfway around the globe U.S. involvement in South Vietnam brought in a new era of U.S. foreign policy and land reform. In this case, U.S. policymakers advocated land reform not to prevent intra-state conflict but to resolve intra-state conflict. While the Vietnamese conflict was largely perceived as a traditional “East-West” struggle, many, including successive U.S. presidents, also saw much of the conflict’s origins in Vietnam’s significant socio-economic underdevelopment and inequality. Consequently, U.S. policymakers, albeit indecisively at times, would turn to land reform as an important element in South Vietnam’s rural pacification strategy. Unfortunately, by the time land reform did finally reach a measure of success late in the war (1970-73), the conflict's outcome had become a fait accompli.

Less than a decade later, faced with an escalating Communist supported insurgency in El Salvador, the United States would once again unsuccessfully advocate land reform as a means of conflict resolution. Based on these less than stellar results in both South Vietnam and El Salvador, some scholars have refuted the land reform hypothesis stating, “One is hard pressed to cite any instance in which agrarian reform implemented amid an ongoing civil war has effectively dissipated that conflict.”5 _{Although this conclusion,} which is based largely on the two above cases, cannot be presented as a land reform theory per se, it does present a significant obstacle for those proposing land reform as a means of conflict resolution in Colombia.

The first part of this chapter presents an overview of the leading social science theories that have tried to answer the pivotal question of why peasants rebel or revolt

5 _{Mason, T. David. "Take two acres and call me in the Morning": Is Land Reform a Prescription for}

specifically concentrating on theories of peasant discontent and theories of inequality, which may have particular relevance in the Colombian case. Implicit or explicit in these theories is the belief that land reform is important for preventing rural-based guerrilla conflict. The second part of this chapter analyzes the two cases of land reform that provide many with strong evidence that land reform will not work in countries where conflict is already underway: South Vietnam (1958-1961, 1970-1973) and El Salvador (1980-1991). As this chapter illustrates, in the South Vietnamese case once the country's elites were willing to concede to a truly redistributive land reform policy late in the war, it was "too little, too late" to make any difference in the war's outcome. In the Salvadoran case, not only was land reform policy fatally flawed in that it did not address the critical landless peasant issue, but also an increase in security force and state-sponsored repression (i.e. death squads) undermined any positive effects of land reform driving many peasants into the insurgency movement. Finally, this chapter's conclusion argues that the two commonly cited cases of South Vietnam and El Salvador do not provide enough evidence to disprove the applicability of the "land reform hypothesis" in the Colombian case.