Guatemala's 1952 Agrarian Reform Law: a critical reassessment

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Douglas W. Trefzger

In November 1950, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman won election to the Guatemalan presidency on a reformist platform advocating agrarian reform. The Guatemala that Arbenz inherited suffered from a seeming economic paradox. Compared to its Central American neighbors, Guatemala was a rich country. It enjoyed Central America's highest gross domestic product, a per capita gross domestic product second only to Costa Rica, and the strongest currency (stable and on par with the U.S. dollar) in the region. Guatemala consistently maintained regional economic dominance in export agriculture, mining and quarrying, and manufacturing. (1)

In spite of its impressive economic indicators, however, Guatemala suffered from a severe misdistribution of land, which in turn contributed to widespread indigence. Approximately 2 percent of the population controlled 72 percent of Guatemala's arable land, while 88 percent of the population held only 14 percent of the land. Of the total privately held land, less than 12 percent was under cultivation. In a country where more than two-thirds of the population participated in agriculture, this meant sweeping poverty, malnutrition, and its accompanying health problems. (2) If ever a country needed an agrarian reform to solve its social ills, Guatemala was that country. In April 1951, shortly after taking office, President Arbenz emphasized the need for such reform:

   All the riches of Guatemala are not as important as the life, the freedom,
   the dignity, the health and the happiness of the most humble of its people.
   How wrong we would be if--mistaking the means for the end--we were to set
   financial stability and economic growth as the supreme goals of our policy,
   sacrificing to them the well being of our masses ... Our task is to work
   together in order to produce more wealth ... But we must distribute these
   riches so that those who have less--and they are the immense
   majority--benefit more, while those who have more--and they are so
   few--also benefit, but to a lesser extent. How could it be otherwise, given
   the poverty, the poor health, and the lack of education of our people? (3)

The following year, on June 17, 1952, the Guatemalan Congress approved Decree 900, Arbenz's Agrarian Reform Law. During its two years of existence, Decree 900 licensed the redistribution of 603,704 hectares of land to an estimated 100,000 Guatemalan families. (4)

In spite of (or perhaps because of) Decree 900's impact, discussion of Guatemala's 1952 Agrarian Reform Law has been contentious. Early debate vacillated between agrarian reform supporters (5) (often former associates of Arbenz) and anticommunist alarmists, who perceived Guatemala's Agrarian Reform Law as a Soviet tactic for infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. (6) Following a brief interlude during the 1960s, and imbued with the critical spirit of the anti-Vietnam movements which called U.S. foreign policy into question, during the 1970s and 1980s, institutional and revisionist histories began to emerge. These works focused on Guatemalan social structures and the role of inequitable land distribution in perpetuation of those structures, while increasingly blaming the United States for the agrarian reform's repeal vis-a-vis a CIA-sponsored coup d'etat in 1954. (7)

Ironically, while exposing the U.S. intervention, since the 1950s, few works have offered a systematic assessment of the 1952 Agrarian Reform Law. There have, however, been notable exceptions. For example, Jose M. Aybar de Soto, considers the agrarian reform's repeal as a function of imposed dependency linkages with the United Sates. By his calculation, the U.S. intervened to protect its economic interests (embodied by the United Fruit Company), which were perceived as being threatened by the agrarian reform. Piero Gleijeses offers a somewhat different analysis, and implies that the agrarian reform was simply a casualty of U.S. anti-communism. Taking an alternative approach and focusing on internal factors affecting the reform, Canadian historian Jim Handy notes that the agrarian policy spawned domestic conflict over land, which contributed (along with U.S. subversion) to its downfall.

Notwithstanding these varying explanations of why the agrarian reform ended, most authors agree that the policy was succeeding when it was subverted. To support their analyses they generally cite economic and land expropriation data to demonstrate that the agrarian reform law in fact succeeded. (8)

However, statistical information on the magnitude of Guatemala's agrarian reform is a problem in and of itself. Clouding the agrarian reform debate, expropriation statistics have been reported interchangeably and inconsistently in three different systems of land measurement: acre, hectares and manzanas. And some statistics vary so drastically as to suggest errors in conversion, entry and even omission (sometimes deliberate). When estimates are standardized into a single unit of land measurement, the problems stand out clearly (see Appendix A). Land reform calculations range from a mere 370,270 hectares to as much as 605,318 hectares. Making matters worse, when economic indices are quoted, they usually appear out of context and often omit important data. In this article, I contend that when seen within their context, the very data utilized to tell a story of land reform success reveal, instead, a pattern of discriminatory land distribution favoring Guatemala's ladino minority and the reform's general failure to improve the lives of Guatemalan peasants. To support this thesis, I will briefly overview the stated objectives of the 1952 Agrarian Reform Law; then I will assess the effectiveness of that law, highlighting the reform's discriminator land distribution patterns, in addition to its destabilizing effects on Guatemala's economy, subsequently disrupting the lives of the Guatemalan people.