How to start a revolution without really trying

National Review, Nov 15, 1985 by Tom Bethell

New owners cannot possibly feel secure in such a climate of mounting despotism. This key defect of land reform has been pointed out by the anthropologist Grace Goodell, now at Johns Hopkin's School for Advanced International Studies. Miss Goodell did her field work in Iran, where in the 1960s the Shah had unwisely taken American and World Bank advice, imposed a draconian land reform, expropriated the mullahs, "rewarded" the peasants with the stolen land, and in the end, as we know, paid the penalty himself.

"If the Shah can take all this land away from the landlords to give to us," Iranian peasants said to Miss Goodell, "how much easier it will be for him to take it away from us some day."

This happened, and it didn't take long. Persuaded that American agribusiness concerns knew more about working the land than his own Iranians, the Shah soon stripped the peasants of their short-lived holdings. Miss Goodell, whose book about Iran, The Elementary Structure of Political Life, will be published by Oxford University Press next year, regards land reform as "the state's Trojan horse for its own penetration and domination of the countryside." But, as the Shah found, it is a dangerous weapon, creating an embittered and perhaps revolutionary middle class that sees itself, probably correctly, as having been wrongfully dispossessed. In much the same way, Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu destabilized South Vietnam with American-backed land reforms in the early and late 1960s.

Tiller at the Till

THE PHILIPPINE fiasco was largely financed by the World Bank, which shelled out at least $50 million to the Marcos government (which of course could use the money to reward political allies). The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) was also involved in a small way, spending about $2 million on various studies and surveys. But AID soon withdraw, apparently having recognized its dangerous features. By 1975 the proposed new "owners" were downgraded to "leaseholders" in AID documents, leaving the Philippine middle class, one may guess, more secure and less rebellious.

Roy Prosterman, the land-reform expert from the University of Washington Law School, testified in 1975 before the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance that he had been "very close to the processes of development of the land reform there [the Philippines], and I have been very disappointed to see the failure of the Philippine land-reform program. It was initiated as a program to transfer land ownership to a million families of tenant farmers, and with respect to that goal they have achieved only 1 per cent of what was intended over a thirty-month period."

Prosterman was also an architect of President Thieu's 1969 land reform in South Vietnam ("successful in achieving its immediate objectives," Prosterman wrote in the Summer 1981 issue of International Security), and he also played a major advisory role a decade later in the land-to-the-tiller phase of the Salvadoran land reform that was established (with the close cooperation of U.S. Ambassador Robert White) in the final year of the Carter Administration. Subsequently, President Reagan's political appointees to AID have been surprised to find that the most unpopular and destabilizing feature of the Philippine reform was repeated in El Salvador: Land was eligible for expropriation on the grounds that its owners were absent, but these turned out in many cases to be middle-class professionasl in San Salvador, not millionaires in Miami. Many of these people soon found that, instead of a patch of land to retire to, they had worthless bonds stamped by the El Salvador Institute for Agrarian Transformation. Later the State Department (in two separate reports) concluded that there was a connection between the injustice and what came to be called "right-wing death squads."