Peruvian Agrarian Reform
That system was characterized by the semi-feudal relationships between haciendas owned by private Spanish patrones which employed peones, a large indigenous group, large cooperatives controlled by the Peruvian state, and areas of land owned indigenous communities (comunidades campesinas) that were recognized by the Peruvian government.
[2] In the years between 1900 and 1918, the sugar cane haciendas in Chicama Valley in the Department of La Libertad were acquired by three industrial giants: the Larco brothers (related to the family of José A. Larco), Graham Rowe and Co (British export company) and the Gildemeister family (merchants from Bremen).
The third agrarian reform law was adopted by the Peruvian Congress in 1964 when Fernando Belaúnde Terry was president (Ley de Reforma Agraria N° 15037).
This reform did not include the large estates on the northern coast, and its application was blocked by a Congress majority of APRA and the right-wing Unión Nacional Odriista.
On 26 June 1969, two days after promulgation of the law, armed soldiers entered the sugar haciendas of the northern coast to take the installations and expel their owners.
The CAPs were formed mainly in the coastal haciendas producing cash crops such as sugar cane, cotton and rice for the external as well as for the internal market, but also in the Andean region of Cuzco, among them the CAP José Zúñiga Letona at the former hacienda Huarán in the Calca District, where the film Kuntur Wachana was made, the cooperative of Ninamarca, whose first director was the famous peasant leader Saturnino Huillca Quispe, and the huge CAP Tupac Amaru II in Anta Province, which produced for the internal market.
The SAIS were organized as cattle-holding cooperatives owned by agricultural workers grazing livestock and associated with traditional neighboring peasant communities.
[8] The start of the downfall of Peruvian Agrarian Reform was when Peru began to experience a severe economic depression around the mid 1970s which continued through the 1980s.
This economic crisis resulted in high levels unemployment, inflation, and food shortages, and was in part caused by the economically protectionist policies and high spending of the Velasco regime and the increasing resistance to state actions from political opposition and business elites in Peru.
[19][7] With the Peruvian state on the verge of economic catastrophe, Velasco lost support from his former military allies resulting in the end of his regime and large scale reductions to land reform attempts.
The Morales administration took out additional loans from the International Monetary Fund,[23] and maintained a greatly reduced version of formal land reform programs until 1978 when economic issues and civil unrest made it impossible to continue the operation, marking the end of attempts at agrarian reform in Peru.
Properties redistributed under Velasco and Morales were not returned to the oligarchies, but work-led cooperatives were converted into independent enterprises that could be easily dissolved by their members.
[25] Few cooperatives remained, such as the sheep-holding SAIS Tupac Amaru N° 1 located in Pachacayo (Junín) with more than 200,000 hectares of land as of 2012,[27] still active in 2021 with 30,000 peasants and 16 associated communities.
[28] Some cooperatives were destroyed by actions of the Maoist Shining Path during the internal conflict in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the regions of Ayacucho and Junín.
