“Taking the Land: Patterns of Peasant Mobilization in Peru, 1960–1975”

• In Event: Agrarian Horizons: Rethinking the Politics of Land Reform

Abstract

In 1969, the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado decreed a sweeping agrarian reform in Peru. The reform was preceded by over a decade of peasant mobilizations, which brought the seizure of hacienda lands across the country – a surge of popular pressure that was among the main motivations for the 1969 law. Starting in the Central Sierra and Cuzco in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these land seizures – tomas de tierra – moved rapidly from demanding improved labor conditions to demanding the land itself. Even after the Velasco reform was decreed, the tomas continued, pressuring the government into accelerating the pace of the reform.
Many of these land seizures were led by peasant federations, whose key role has been noted in the literature on Peru’s agrarian reform. Less attention, however, has been focused on these federations’ distinctive combination of syndical and community-based forms of organization – melding urban radical traditions with indigenous conceptions of land and labor. A source of great strength, did this fusion at the same time contain the seeds of future divisions? Through a re-reading of selected mobilizations and tomas – from Pasco and La Convención in 1960–61 to Piura and Andahuaylas in 1973–74 – I will examine the entwinement of the two modes of organizing, and explore its consequences for the eventual outcomes of the agrarian reform.

Author

• Tony Wood, New York University