Nicaragua
The Nicaraguan Peasantry Gives New Direction to Agrarian Reform
Envío team
On June 14, the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and Agricultural Development announced to thousands of peasant farmers in Masaya that the northern part of their department had been declared a “Special Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform Zone” and that in the first phase of the reform, 7,457 manzanas of land would be turned over to 1,300 families. (One manzana = .7 hectares.) Among the affected lands were 2,032 manzanas belonging to Enrique Bolaños, the president of the High Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP). Bolaños interpreted the expropriation as a personal “vendetta” of the Sandinistas because of his prominent opposition to the revolution. “Any Nicaraguan,” he said, “who still has something here and has not lost it, is going to lose it because this is the system, the ideology and the doctrine of those who govern this country.”
At the US Embassy and in Washington’s political circles, where Bolaños and his compatriots at COSEP are seen as the sole representatives of the Nicaraguan private sector, various accusations circulated:
- The Sandinistas had flagrantly violated their own agrarian reform law;
- The Nicaraguan government had abandoned its program of guarantees for private enterprise;
- The expropriations in Masaya had created a climate of uncertainty and fear in the private sector;
- The events in Masaya proved that the policy of national unity and a mixed economy were nothing more than tactical steps on the read to complete state control of the Nicaraguan economy;
- It’s all proof that the Nicaraguan government is taking orders from the Soviet Union.
US officials were torn between grief at the economic losses of their friend “Churruco” Bolaños, and their joy at having a new “private sector martyr.” For the international media, which only recognizes as news those facts which would appear to confirm their preconceived stereotypes, the Masaya case fits neatly into the category, “Nicaragua’s Marxist-Leninist government.”
Neither US officials nor Western journalists gave any thought to what the events in Masaya might signify for the overall process of agrarian reform in Nicaragua. Had they chosen to listen to the words of Juan Galán, a leader of the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG) who spoke at the June 14 event in Masaya, they would have been forced to recognize a more complex reality. Galán, who represents many times more private producers just in Masaya than COSEP does in the whole country, criticized the government’s previous agrarian reform policies and praised the new distribution of Masaya’s cotton lands to individual farmers for the production of basic grains, fruits and vegetables.
In this article envío examines the historical and social background to the events in Masaya, and outlines the ramifications of this case for the agrarian reform policy at the national level.
Can agrarian reform please everyone?Nicaragua’s agrarian reform is a unique project that has truly benefited small farmers. In Nicaragua lands have been distributed to 29% of the mostly poor rural population and the lands of another 39% have been legalized with titles, all without significantly touching the lands of private producers who want to continue producing. The remaining 32% of the peasant farmers, however, are among the poorest of the poor in rural Nicaragua, sharecroppers and indentured servants who must sell their labor to their landowning masters.
Nicaragua’s agrarian reform law is not only respectful of the large growers, but also relatively conservative. It allows for expropriation in cases where the owner has left the land idle, maintained servile relations of worker exploitation (various systems of debt peonage), or has decapitalized his operation. In all other contemporary agrarian reforms in Latin America, the laws have called for the expropriation of all producers with more land than an arbitrary fixed amount stipulated in the law. In Chile, for example, all farmers with more than 115 manzanas of land were expropriated. In El Salvador landowners with more than 715 manzanas saw their properties expropriated in 1981 during the first phase of the agrarian reform program, and the second phase calls for the expropriation of all those with between 215 and 715 manzanas. In the historical agrarian reforms of Mexico, the Soviet Union, China and Bolivia, peasant farmers occupied the lands of their bosses and the revolutionary governments supported the redistribution of the land among them.
This moderation was possible until recently for three reasons:
1) Nicaragua has the lowest population density in all of Central America (7.5 manzanas per rural inhabitant, compared to 0.6 manzanas per inhabitant in El Salvador).
2) The fact that Somoza and his associates controlled 20% of the land gave the new government a large amount of abandoned land to work with, making expropriations of other large landowners unnecessary;
3) The respect and authority accorded to the FSLN by the rural population permitted the government to prevent the disorderly division of Somoza’s lands and the occupation of other lands.
Five years after the revolution, envío evaluated the agrarian reform as a great success because of its originality, its prudent pace, and because growth in agricultural production had been maintained throughout the period between 1980 and 1984 (number 37, July 1984). No other agrarian reform had maintained similar growth: in the first five years all others saw a reduction in agricultural output of between 20% and 50%. Nicaragua’s success reflected the strength of the alliance between the revolution and the private producers.
The complaints and protests directed at the US Congress by the leaders of COSEP and the Agricultural Producers Union of Nicaragua (UPANIC) have created the false impression that Nicaragua’s agrarian reform should have made everybody happy. Historically, all agrarian reforms have been implemented within a social transformation process in which the majority displaces the old dominant minority. To expect that the Nicaraguan agrarian reform could develop without tensions is both disingenuous and politically dangerous.
Second, the agrarian reform has not been free of internal costs either. The transformation of seasonal wage laborers into landowners has reduced the manual labor force available to the big producers. This has been the principal criticism of both the large private producers and the state farm administrators. The counterrevolutionary war, which has been quite serious since 1983, has further aggravated the dearth of manual labor, especially considering that seasonal agricultural workers make up a significant portion of the Sandinista army ranks.
The case of MasayaEnrique Bolaños’ interpretation of the arbitrary and vengeful nature of the Sandinistas is not just an individual reaction. It is an interpretation that the president of COSEP shares with the expropriated producers and their children who have joined the ranks of the counterrevolution. It is not entirely inaccurate because, given forty years of dictatorship during which almost every large producer was obliged to have some interaction with Somoza, the process in August 1979 of identifying those meriting confiscation was bound to suffer from human error and political excesses. Although all of those confiscated benefited from the dictatorship, some had much stronger ties to it than others.
The ideology that sees personal rancor and opportunism as the driving force of history is widespread in the countryside. Contra propaganda, which always emphasizes these aspects, often has more impact than the historical and social ideology of the Sandinistas. Without ignoring the force of this world view, there are many reasons for interpreting the events in Masaya as a response to specific conditions and problems and not the result of capricious Sandinista vendettas.
Though the events which have taken place in rural Masaya reflect a national situation, Masaya is an intense case in many respects: the degree of peasant pressure for land, the particularities of land tenure, the class structure, and the population’s role in the national economy. While Nicaragua has an average of 7.5 manzanas per rural resident, the figure for the department of Masaya is comparable to El Salvador—only 0.6 manzanas. Before the revolution, the contrast between the land concentration in the hands of a few large producers, and the corollary existence of small farmers with plots insufficient even for their own consumption, was more severe in Masaya than in the rest of the country. (See Table I)
Population density on the one hand, and the concentration of land in the hands of cotton and coffee producers and cattle ranchers on the other, created a significantly more polarized class structure in Masaya than in other parts of Nicaragua. Table II shows that more than 75% of the economically active population (EAP) of Masaya is proletarian or semi-proletarian, while in Nicaragua as a whole these two categories account for 66% of the rural EAP.
The statistics do not fully reveal the poverty and uprootedness that Masayans suffer due to the lack of stable employment. Masaya’s population is principally a floating proletariat, which travels 30 or 40 kilometers to Managua or other departments in search of land for rent or an ongoing project they might become involved in, such as CONARC, a project in Carazo for the renovation of coffee farms. As one young activist put it, “What do statistics mean when one third of the population can disappear for a week, a month, or a year?”
It is extraordinary that despite this situation, Masayans have not lost their sense of ancestral roots. Despite their well developed integration into the national market, their proximity to Managua, and thus a privileged position in the deficient national infrastructure, Masayans have retained their local identity. Although rural life has become strongly market oriented, people jealously cling to their indigenous past, and continue to celebrate their religious traditions—especial the patron saint festivals—with more religious fervor than the majority of the rural population in other parts of the country.
The people of Masaya, poor, highly mobile, with a strong attachment to place and to their own longstanding religious traditions, belong to no one, neither to Cardinal Miguel Obando nor to the government. It is true that their support for the FSLN during the insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship was enough to capture the attention of the international media, which portrayed Masaya as leading the struggle. Also, in 1982 and 1983 Masaya was the leading department in voluntary military service participation. It is also true, however, that the population turns out in droves for their patron saint or Cardinal Obando. These should not be interpreted as signs of their political affiliation or of their allegiance to outside leaders. Above all else, Masaya has maintained its identify of independence and isolation.
In the past year, the peasant farmers of Masaya had been expressing their waning enthusiasm for the FSLN by not participating in UNAG, not responding to calls for military service, and not attending FSLN political ceremonies. This “political strike” was a key factor in the decision to cede to the historical demands of the farmers who, having given so much support to the FSLN in the past, had now reached the end of their rope.
Another important factor was the explosive economic situation Masaya’s population had been suffering. Every year, the arrival of the April rains had seen the government offices fill with farmers asking for land from state farms, or soliciting solutions to their conflicts with large landowners who did not want to rent them land under the conditions of the new laws. As can be seen in Table III, the number or subsistence farm families from Masaya that need land has far exceeded the response. Even after the massive redistribution of June 1985, 6,191 families still need land.
It is important to note that the other landowners whose farms were divided among the small farmers did not side with Bolaños. They agreed to the negotiations and sold their lands to the state. The cotton producers who were renting land to small farmers also accepted the transfer of these lands to the farmers.
The government, too, displayed a degree of flexibility, as in the case of the Bárcenas Levi family, whose farm was occupied by small farmers from the settlement of San Bernardo for four days. The government demanded that they leave the property, because Bárcenas had planted 700 manzanas of cotton and wanted to harvest his crop and pay off his bank loans before turning the land over to the farmers. The government accepted this proposal despite protest from the farmers.
Response to a local problem or a new state in the agrarian reform?The events in Masaya are only a part of the mosaic of changes taking place at a national level in Nicaraguan agriculture and the revolution’s agrarian policy. Nonetheless, the analysis of the steps taken by Masaya’s small farmers in their fight for land can help us evaluation the evolution of national agrarian policy. We can now talk about three stages in Nicaragua’s land reform:
- Consolidation of the state sector (1979-83)
- Development of the cooperative sector (1983-85)
- Prioritizing of peasant farmers (1985- )
Stage one: Mobilizing peasant farmers as workers and consolidating the state sector (1979-83)
Masaya was liberated on June 27, 1979, in the tactical retreat from Managua to the “City of Flowers.” After the city was taken, some 847 families occupied 2,000 manzanas of land abandoned by Somocistas as well as land belonging to those not closely associated with Somoza. In the days preceding the revolutionary victory, Sandinista activists who had been organizing the peasant farmers in the hills southwest of the city of Masaya developed a small socialist republic of farming cooperatives. All the vehicles, tractors, and agricultural supplies of Masaya were commandeered to produce food for the combatants still fighting against the Somoza regime. With the triumph of the revolution and the second planting of 1979, the peasant farmers of Masaya were very enthusiastic about the revolution’s agrarian policy.
This enthusiasm turned to concern when at the beginning of 1980 the FSLN decided to dismantle the cooperatives and construct the Area of People’s Property (APP) using the model of the state farm. While the move was not well received by the farmers, they accepted it because of their great respect for the FSLN. The government obliged the farmers to abandon the occupied lands belonging to “non-Somocista owners” and to sign up as laborers on the state farms.
In Masaya, the state sector was not at all specialized. It was producing bananas, corn, beans, cotton, coffee, sorghum, fruits and vegetables, and even administering the small farm of a Somocista who had raised rabbits. The most frequent criticism made by the small farmers was that they could produce more efficiently than the state, if given individual access to land. In León and other parts of Nicaragua where there had been land occupations during the insurrection, the results were similar, although the state eliminated the cooperative system in these areas before doing so in Masaya.
In February of 1980 thousands of Masaya’s farmers marched to the Ministry of Agriculture in Managua to petition that no more farms be returned to their old owners, that a low ceiling be placed on land rental prices, that legislation be enacted obliging landowners to rent their idle lands and that credit be made available to poor farmers. The demands were authentic and showed that the farmers of Masaya were not satisfied with their new role as laborers on the state farms. The government responded positively to all of the economic demands, but did not respond to their fundamental demand for individual plots. During the rest of 1980, the planting of basic grains by small farmers was greatly expanded under two forms of production: in the majority of cases, as producers who cooperatively applied for credit but individually worked their own land or land rented from large producers (1,821 cooperatives), and to a lesser extent, as collective work groups on lands in the state farms turned over to the farmers for a planting cycle (541 pre-cooperatives). The latter groups were the forerunners of the Sandinista Farming Cooperatives. These two types of cooperatives principally account for the enormous flow of agricultural credit received by small farmers in 1980. Little was done to promote the cooperatives, however, since all of the government’s attention was devoted to developing the state sector. During 1980-81 many of these cooperative failed for lack of technical assistance, and more importantly, because the government did not give the land to the farmers in a definitive and secure way.
Another factor that prevented the success of the cooperatives was the diversity of their members. Along with the landless peasant farmers and agricultural laborers, there were carpenters, bricklayers, merchants, and all types of poor craftspeople looking to increase their incomes through access to land. Farmers seeking individual plots criticized the cooperatives because the results were shared equally by all even though some members worked longer and more efficiently than others. Despite the desire for private property, poverty compelled the farmers to accept the lands on a cooperative basis. This was the case with the farmers of Masaya who, in 1980, occupied the lands of Mario Gutiérrez Peña, a Somocista who escaped confiscation in 1979. At the time of the occupation there was no agrarian reform, and the period of confiscations had passed. As a response to the farmers who had for many years risked their lives by providing assistance to clandestine Sandinistas, the government negotiated with Gutiérrez Peña, bought his farm and transferred it to the farmers as a cooperative.
In Masaya the pressure for private parcelization of land, stronger than in the rest of the country, was mitigated by a series of particular factors: distribution of APP lands during a single planting cycle (although always to be worked collectively), access to low interest credit, higher salaries than under Somoza, new sources of work in Managua and in Carazo (14,000 jobs in the CONARCA project), and access to private sector land under article 35 of the agrarian reform law, which obliges large landowners to rent land to small farmers if they request it. The desire for private plots was so strong that most farmers preferred to rent land they could work individually than to receive land from the APP free of charge. Although the government did not respond to the demand for private plots, the farmers did not forget that the revolution had given them a new sense of dignity and access to productive resources and power that they had never hand under Somoza.
During this first stage there was a prejudice on the part of the government against the cooperative sector, and even more so against individual parcels. Three fears led the FSLN to put off giving land to the farmers:
- That large scale distribution of lands would create an acute scarcely of manual labor in the agro-export sector, thus reducing vital foreign exchange;
- That development of more cooperative forms of production would become impossible once private plots had been distributed;
- That parcelization of land would provoke a wave of land occupations, damaging the fragile alliance with the private sector, the model of the mixed economy, and the national unity necessary to confront the US aggression.
In distant rural areas of the country, where the farmers knew the Sandinista guerrillas and remembered Carlos Fonseca’s promise that “In Nicaragua no farmer will be without land nor land without men working it,” the FSLN was even more concerned about distributing land to individual farmers. Farmers in these mountainous zones, unlike those from the Pacific plain, saw very little temporary distribution of APP lands for seasonal peasant use. In fact, on some state farms, where during Somoza’s time the workers received land to plant a subsistence garden, the state administrators had stopped this practice because they saw it as a backward and paternalistic form of exploitation. This rapid elimination of paternalism without a response to the demand for land gave the state sector a very bad image among the farmers and left it open to anti-Sandinista propaganda attacks from both the ultra-left and the first counterrevolutionary groups that were forming at this time, especially in Jinotega and Matagalpa.
Although the agrarian reform was announced in mid-1980 on the first anniversary of the revolution, the three fears mentioned above delayed its implementation until late 1981. At the national level this interim period was characterized by the constitution of a new organization, the National Union of Farmers and Cattlemen (UNAG). It was founded in April 1981 to represent the specific interests of small- and medium-scale producers. The Agricultural Workers Association (ATC) created before the revolution had not served these sectors since its main purpose was to represent salaried farmworkers. Although the new organization called for land reform and access to productive assistance for small farmers, the diversity of its membership prevented the organization from becoming a mechanism for mobilizing farmers in need of land.
In this same period the state announced a new program, the National Food Program (PAN), designed to increase the production of basic grains. News of this program led the farmers to expect more support for their demands, as they had always been the traditional producers of basic grains. PAN, however, did not prioritize peasant production. Instead, until 1983 PAN served to promote state sector projects co-funded with socialist countries.
From October 1981, when the agrarian reform law began to be applied, to the end of 1982, only slightly more than a quarter of the 4% of national arable land expropriated had been distributed to some 8,045 peasant families. In the same period the state sector expanded its agricultural lands from 20% to 23% of the national total. The alliance with the small and medium private producers was consolidated more than the alliance with the peasant farmers.
During this first stage of the agrarian reform the prioritization of the state farm as a form of production also served to neutralize peasant mobilization and thereby reduce pressure on the private sector’s lands. Interestingly enough, the consolidation of the state sector succeeded in reestablishing a favorable climate for capitalist agriculture in Nicaragua on a national level.
In Masaya, despite the government’s efforts to guarantee a favorable climate for the cotton producers and build a strong state sector, peasant unrest persisted. In August 1981, on the heels of the announcement of the agrarian reform law, a group of FSLN leaders began to test a new style of organizing among the peasant farmers. They started with the idea that the principal point of political reference for the farmers is their local community. Instead of organizing them through the new organizations promoted by the revolution, these activists began to work through the local interests of the community, whatever they might be. They addressed the parents’ demands for healthcare and education and, above all, involved the community fully in discussion of land reform plans. The new organizations were called Local Agrarian Reform Committees (CRAC), and were an expression of the historic demands of these small rural communities.
During this period there was a demonstration involving some 2,000 farmers who marched to the city of Masaya demanding that the government revise its new agrarian reform law. The law called for the expropriation of large, idle farms, but in Masaya the majority of the farms had less than 500 manzanas and were being well exploited. “In Masaya,” the farmers said, “the law passes through the clouds, it doesn’t touch anybody.” They presented a list of farms of between 3 and 20 manzanas whose owners had left the country after the fall of Somoza. They also presented lists with the names of thousands of peasant farmers who were renting lands, with the expectation that the clauses concerning land rental would be applied to property owners with more than 50 manzanas.
Until 1983 the distribution of land to the peasantry of Masaya was guided more by the desire to rationalize and consolidate the state sector than to satisfy the farmers’ demands. Some of the new state farms were distributed under collective titles to peasant farmers but the pressure for land remained constant throughout the period.
Stage two: Mobilizing the peasants as collective producers and consolidating a cooperative production sectorThe second stage of the Sandinista agrarian policy developed as a response to a perceived waning of support for the FSLN in the countryside. The wave of international aid which arrived immediately after July 19, 1979, began to dwindle; the country experienced a sharp decrease in foreign exchange, without ever having recovered pre-insurrection levels of economic activity. With shortages and inflation on the rise, the real wages of rural workers deteriorated substantially. In Masaya, this flagging enthusiasm was particularly marked due to a series of factors that affected small farmers in the second half of 1982 and the beginning of 1983. The nationwide growth in small industry and construction between 1980 and 1982 had created hundreds of jobs for Masayans in urban Managua and Masaya. With the economic crisis, however, these job sources dried up. Concurrently, the enormous project for renovating coffee farms in Carazo (CONARCA) came to an end, leaving 4,000 more Masayans unemployed. In this context of unemployment, shortages and inflation, the pressure by small farmers in Masaya for land to cultivate intensified dramatically.
Rosendo Díaz, the president of the large producers’ organization UPANIC, said, “On the one hand, the economic policy creates labor shortages. You go and look for people to work on your farm and there aren’t any. Nor can we mechanize production because there is no foreign exchange. On the other hand, we have an abundance of lazy bums here in the cities, people who could eventually constitute a danger, because need bites like a dog.” His reasoning was correct—peasants were returning from the cities unemployed and in dire need of land. This need, and not political agitation by the FSLN, explains the political behavior of Masaya’s small farmers.
As a consequence of these economic pressures on the peasant family, the third massive peasant movement for land in Masaya occurred at the end of 1982. Some 1,200 peasant families from 23 communities demanded the expropriation of lands belonging to SAIMS, a cotton enterprise owned by Bolaños and other large landowners. Just as it had done in early 1980 and in August of 1981, the government turned a deaf ear to peasant demands, opting to defend the large property owners’ interests and to maintain its policy of national unity. The failure of this third attempt by the peasant farmers to attain land near their communities—an expectation spawned by the revolution—caused a wave of mute discontent to spread through Masaya. From their perspective of extreme poverty, Masaya’s peasant farmers could not understand why the revolution had to respond to international demands and not domestic ones. Living in the heart of the Pacific region, they could not understand the importance of maintaining a policy of national unity in the face of this aggression, especially when such a policy required postponing their claim to land.
Similar situations were erupting throughout Nicaragua’s peasant population. The Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA) heard this growing discontent, but instead of answering the specific peasant demands, it responded within the framework of its own ideology: transformation of an underdeveloped economy through modern technology. During the first stage of agricultural reform, this principle served as the foundation for developing the prioritized state sector. Now, in the second stage, it dictated that peasant farmers should be organized into production cooperatives, which would simplify the distribution of technical assistance by the state.
This second stage began with a program for special assistance to certain prioritized cooperatives. Five hundred cooperatives from across the country were chosen to receive special state attention for modernizing production. The motto was “few, but good.” Although this is a necessary guideline for any intensification of production based on imported technology, in practice, it left 75% of the cooperatives and 90% of the peasant population disenfranchised from the benefits of the revolutionary government.
This stage, nonetheless, marked a change in the direction of agrarian reform, bringing to an end the state policy that denied farmers access to land out of fear of losing the agro-export labor force. This fear proved unfounded when cotton producing cooperatives in León and Chinandega were more successful than their private and state competitors. As Table IV illustrates, the growth of production cooperatives (CAS), stifled during the first years after 1979, began to occur in 1983. In that year alone, more than 10,000 peasant families received collective land titles, while only 248 families received individual plots of land.
The majority of the land given to cooperatives during the second half of 1983 came from state farms or from farms expropriated under agrarian reform laws. In Masaya, however, the government did not touch private property. Instead, MIDINRA responded to the discontent of farmers there by giving them 2,000 manzanas of land from state farms. They had demanded Bolaños’ farms, but because of economic necessity they accepted whatever the government was willing to give. The particularly strong peasant pressure in Masaya led the state to turn over its land in time for the May planting, whereas in the rest of the country the farmers received their land too late for the 1983 planting season.
Table IV also illustrates the tremendous effort made by the government to guarantee farmers’ formal ownership of land already in their possession. This process of giving people titles to the land they already worked (legalization) took place mostly in the northern mountain regions and was precipitated by the war. The armed counterrevolutionary presence in these areas intensified in March 1983 and MIDINRA assumed the farmers would be more apt to defend land that was legally theirs.
MIDINRA’s response to peasant demands for new land, however, was even less successful in the mountain regions than on the Pacific plain. On the one hand, MIDINRA officials were still afraid of granting land and losing the labor force needed on the large coffee and cattle farms. On the other, the traditional peasant farmers in these regions rejected the modern collective form of ownership pushed by the state. Farmers who had collaborated closely with Carlos Fonseca remembered his words on individual land ownership and had faith that sooner or later revolutionary forces would cause a change in MIDINRA’s policies.
Although some 30,000 families received land titles for the land they had been working, this did not signify any real change. Many of these farmers were given titles to tiny parcels of land that were not even large enough for subsistence farming. Another large segment of the peasant population living in the northern regions work under a system of indentured servitude, in which the property owners pay the farmers a minimal salary and give them a small plot of land for subsistence farming in exchange for their labor. The farmers must be completely at the disposal of the employer or they are evicted, and the employers additionally place restrictions on the crops the farmers may grow on their small plots. Neither agricultural reforms nor the process of formalizing land ownership had done anything to change this oppressive system under which such farmers lived.
In 1984, as Table V demonstrates, MIDINRA continued to give lands to farmers in cooperative form. By the end of 1984, 33,000 families had joined production cooperatives, representing 22% of the total number of peasant families in the country. The majority of these cooperatives were established in the Pacific region and in parts of the country where roads and highways already existed. The few cooperatives MIDINRA was able to establish in the mountain regions became primary targets for contra attacks, reinforcing the farmers’ resistance to them. Because of their model of production, cooperatives are highly dependent on state resources, yet the government is incapable of attending to the great number of them formed in 1983-84. The number of prioritized cooperatives increased to 822, but these privileged few continue to represent a minority of the peasant population.
During the course of 1984, the government was faced not only with its inability to adequately service the entire cooperative sector, but with the growing criticism from a peasant population increasingly dissatisfied with the state and the FSLN. The peasant farmers resented the fact that in order to receive land they had to work it collectively, which in turn implied a greater dependency on the government. The resulting loss of support for the Sandinistas in the countryside is forcing MIDINRA to further change its agricultural reform policies.
Stage three: Mobilizing the peasants as individual farmersDespite the growth of the cooperative farming model in stage two, only 7% of the nation’s arable land had been turned over to peasant farmers in the five years since the revolution. During the first two stages of agrarian reform, individual farmers were disregarded. As Table V illustrates, it was only by joining CAS cooperatives that farmers received any significant amount of land.
During the second stage another type of cooperative, the Credit and Service Cooperative (CCS) was introduced. The CCS are made up of individual farmers who join together strictly to apply for loans at the bank. Although they apply as a group, they receive individual credit lines. The majority of CCS members have not received any land, technical assistance or capital investment through the agrarian reform.
While a principle factor in explaining why so little land has been handed over to the peasant farmers is the FSLN’s need to maintain an alliance with the private business sector, another is that the revolution’s leaders, most of whom come from cities, lack confidence in these small farmers’ traditional technology and culture. From the peasant perspective, these mitigating factors are irrelevant; agrarian reform has been insufficient and inappropriate.
In Masaya there had been even less agrarian reform than on the national level. While nationally, 22% of peasant farmers had received land collectively, in Masaya only 16% had received collective land by the end of 1984 (see Table III). Approximately 8,000 of Masaya’s peasant families had received no land at all. In addition, the government’s programs for controlling the marketing of basic grains and price subsidies, which benefit the urban population and agricultural laborers, have had a negative impact on Masaya’s farmers. Because of their extreme poverty, they are accustomed to working as individual subsistence farmers, seasonal laborers and merchants all the same time. The small profits Masaya’s farmers would make selling their agricultural goods in the cities were eliminated by the government’s national programs for controlling commerce.
Throughout 1984, FSLN members in Masayan communities began to respond to peasant demands at a grassroots level. They began projects to develop fruit and vegetable gardens to supplement the subsistence diet of tenant farmers. In a break from the past, these projects paid special attention to the individual peasant family and the government cooperated with significant loans and services. It was these Sandinistas at the community level who were able to convince the national leaders of the need to change agrarian reform policies during 1984. It became clear that Masaya’s farmers were losing patience with the government.
The November 1984 election results forced government leaders to finally pay attention to the unrest in Masaya’s countryside. The FSLN won 55% of the valid votes cast in Masaya, and 40% of the registered vote. Although this signifies a clear majority in favor of the FSLN, the percentage was considerably below the national average. The election results also revealed another serious problem: in small towns where less than 10% of the population had received land, the opposition parties received a notably higher percentage of the vote than they did nationally.
To add to its problems of support in the countryside, the newly elected government was forced to implement a series of harsh measures to combat the growing economic crisis. These measures were intended to stimulate private production by paying higher prices for products and lower the fiscal deficit by eliminating government subsidies on basic goods. The government also implemented a series of wage hikes, especially in the countryside, to help the worker confront the round of inflation that followed. Nevertheless, those hardest hit by the measures were the great majority of rural and urban poor. As Tables VI and VII illustrate, the prices of basic goods went up 300-400%, while salaries went up only 150%. Although farmers produce their own beans and corn, the costs of machetes, boots, tools and other goods the farmers needs to produce skyrocketed in 1985.
All of these new economic pressures on the peasant family triggered the fourth uprising in Masaya.
Today: A period of self-criticism and restructuring of Sandinista agrarian reformOn October 21, 1984, FSLN leader Víctor Tirado López promised an assembly of owners of medium-sized farms that “In the spirit of the mixed economy, we will respect any type of property against the alarmist campaigns that attempt to spread panic in the countryside, campaigns formulated by the enemies of the revolution. We reiterate our respect for property in the countryside. The era of large-scale confiscations ended with the expropriations of the Somoza clan.” As previously indicated, only 7% of the country’s arable land had passed into the hands of peasant farmers, and half of this 7% came from the state sector and not from the expropriation of private property.
Faced with these facts it would be difficult to accuse the FSLN of disrespect for rural private property, but the many signs of waning peasant support forced the FSLN to reevaluate its agrarian reform policy. And so, while projects were being developed to meet peasant demands on a national level, the FSLN told UNAG leaders in Masaya that they were ready to respond to the historic demands of Masaya’s peasantry.
The dilemma facing the FSLN, in Masaya and throughout the country, is how to develop an agrarian policy that promotes national unity, maintains the guarantees made to the private sector and regains the support of the peasant. The basis change in policy has been an increase in the distribution of lands on an individual rather than collective basis. As Table VIII demonstrates, the initial plan for the distribution of land on an individual basis was vastly expanded at mid-year. The new, revised plan calls for the distribution of six times as much land. More families will receive individual parcels of land in one year, according to this new plan, than in the four preceding years. This by no means signifies a massive distribution of lands to the peasantry, although it remains to be seen if the program takes off and surpasses the government’s calculations.
The fundamental problem is where and how to obtain land for distributing among the peasant farmers. The first step is to distribute state lands and, only when they are insufficient or inadequate for peasant needs—as in the case of Masaya—to negotiate with private land owners in the area. The process of negotiation between the state and private producers begins with talks between government officials and landowners whose farms are liable to expropriation in accord with agrarian reform laws. A price for the land in question is agreed upon and the payment is made in cash. Until the case of Masaya, the government had successfully avoided conflicts in this way, keeping promises made to the private agricultural sector while at the same time responding to the pressure from the peasant farmers.
Was a law broken in Masaya?Negotiations between the governments and the private landowners in Masaya took place within this framework. The government offered land owners in Masaya cash payments and/or equally fertile lands in other areas where there is less pressure for land. In effect, the government was saying to the large landowners, “We have defended your rights as property owners against peasant uprisings for six years, but it is unjust to deny land to the farmers, whose support we are losing, while you are not exploiting these lands to their full capacity.”
The transfer of lands in Masaya came under a clause in the agrarian reform law which stipulates that the government can create “agrarian reform zones” wherever a change in land tenure is necessary to solve special problems or promote development projects of strategic national importance. This clause was earlier used to facilitate the construction of two high technology projects, a sugar mill and a dairy, in the department of Managua. In the case of Masaya, the long postponed demands of the country’s poorest population were considered strategically important for the nation. According to the stipulations of this clause, MIDINRA can expropriate land even if it is being used productively if it is located in a reform zone. In the case of the sugar cane project in Managua the clause was invoked to expropriate the land of an entire village, Las Canoas, whose residents were moved 20 kilometers, according to the same legal stipulations. Although the move was very hard on these families, who are also private producers and lived in miserable conditions for weeks while their new houses were built, there were no complaints from COSEP, the US Embassy or the international press that the agrarian reform law had been violated.
Beyond the fact that Masaya was declared an agrarian reform zone, thereby making the expropriation of Bolaños’ farms legal, the efficiency of the large producers in the area, both state and private, was seriously in question. For three of the last four years, the cotton yield and profits per manzana have been lower on large private farms than on medium and small ones and one year, it was lower than on state farms.
Having received the go-ahead from the FSLN, peasant farmers in Masaya took over the lands pertaining to the “Camilo Ortega” state farm at the end of May. Although many farmers doubted UNAG promises that the government would really turn over lands from the private sector, they marched to the city of Masaya on June 14 to demand these lands and lands from other state farms. The march was not as large as the three previous mobilizations, but it was perhaps even more important. The state turned over 1,877 manzanas of its land and announced that 2,032 manzanas had been expropriated from SAIMSA because the company had refused to sell or negotiate. Two days after the march, the minister of agriculture, Comandante Jaime Wheelock, announced that a group of patriotic private producers had sold 3,544 manzanas to the state to distribute among peasant farmers.
Table IX, however, shows that of the 7,547 manzanas accumulated, only 3,458 has actually been turned over to the farmers. This hesitancy is due to the government’s historic lack of trust in Masaya’s peasantry, and in part to the need for discussions in each community about what lands the farmers want and, more importantly, how they will be parceled out. These questions are far more difficult to resolve than those which accompanied the previous collective distribution of land. The FSLN has little experience with this type of peasant policy and those party members who were chastised for pushing such a policy in 1981 have by now been transferred to other regions where they have other responsibilities.
This lack of experience is the result of the FSLN’s attempt to maintain its alliance with the private sector over the past six years. Grassroots pressure for change in Masaya and in many other rural and urban areas is growing. As both the economic crisis and war of aggression bear down more heavily on the poor, the FSLN is forced by this pressure to reformulate the character of that alliance.
In Masaya the government did not violate legal limits. The limits that are disappearing are the restrictions previously placed against popular mobilization in order to defend the alliance with the private sector. Legal forms of property in the countryside will be respected but that does not mean that more tensions between the poor and the rich will not be forthcoming. For that matter, if popular pressure on the government requires the legislature to pass land reform laws similar to those of El Salvador or other countries in Latin America, no one should be surprised.
Where is agrarian reform headed?Table IX demonstrates that the change in agrarian reform towards individual ownership has not been sufficient. There exists, however, the process for self-criticism that allows us to categorize the events of 1985 as a new stage in the agrarian reform. This new stage raises many questions concerning expropriations, the way in which to distribute land to peasant farmers, the number of families to be benefited, etc. Also in question is the future of national unity and the government’s alliance with the private sector.
Events to date indicate that the government will continue to guarantee the private sector the conditions under which to do business. The government has demonstrated it willingness to accept a severe decline in the living standard of the working class in order to rebuild the country’s economy. In addition, MIDINRA, far from radicalizing its process of expropriation, has kept its promise to negotiate and make immediate payments. Agrarian reform in Nicaragua continues to be more conservative than in other Latin American countries. There is a clear desire to maintain national unity and enough state land to assume that the government will meet the demands of the peasantry at the costs of the state sector and the fiscal deficit.
Popular pressure, however, is changing the character of the national unity alliance in ways similar to the changes that took place in 1980 when Alfonso Robelo, Violeta Chamorro, and Miguel Obando turned their backs on their people’s revolution. Though the issue was more directly political on that occasion, the masses insisted on their rightful participation in the fruits of the revolution. As this analysis has shown, the case of Masaya is a particularly volatile expression of pressures erupting throughout the country. The expropriations took place in Masaya through negotiation in all but one case—that of Bolaños. His properties were confiscated because of SAIMSA’s uncooperative and extremely political behavior. It is unlikely that these same problems will occur in other parts of the country, where there is an abundance of land. Nevertheless, land reform invariably sets the stage for other changes. As peasant farmers receive land, owners lose workers and fewer workers means less profits. Labor shortages have been a constant source of conflict throughout Nicaraguan history, from the colonial period onward. Labor shortages will undoubtedly provoke ongoing structural transformation and thus shifts in the program of national unity.
The character of the alliance with the private sector can also be expected to change gradually as a result of the increased price of agricultural goods on the national market and the continuing damage done by the war. These two factors will continue to motivate agricultural workers to leave their jobs as agro-export laborers and to demand land to cultivate goods to sell in the urban centers.
In all probability, the most commercially valuable land in the country, which is naturally located around these urban centers, will be distributed to small farmers. The land in Masaya is valuable precisely because of its proximity to the capital, a prime market for fruits, vegetables and other non-basic foodstuffs (see Tables VI and VII). A redistribution of land on the Carazo plateau, presently used for growing coffee, is expected. Here too, the small farmers would plant crops to sell in Masaya and Managua.
Ironically, then, the new measures taken by the Nicaraguan government to support the private sector may undercut private enterprise for those who control the country’s best lands. The dynamic of the new economic measures demand that agricultural laborers either move to the cities to become workers and small merchants or demand land through the agrarian reform, since it is more profitable to produce or sell food to the urban population than to continue working on the patrician’s agro-export farm. (The thorny questions raised by declining exports, by economic measures that backfire as the popular sectors demand more from their government, and the future of the economy under the ongoing siege of the low-intensity war are the topics of a forthcoming envío article.) The new agrarian reform policy makes the latter more likely, since the support and incentives which the government now offers to the private agricultural sector will be extended to small landholders. Considering the free market which presently exists for agricultural products and land, private producers with large tracts of commercially valuable lands will likely lose them to the growing sector of small peasant producers.
The war, ironically, has also added to the power of the peasant rather than the large landowner. First, it has caused a scarcity of labor. Second, contra attacks, designed to reduce the coffee harvest or otherwise interrupt the commerce of agricultural goods, affect large-scale affluent producers far more than small family businesses. Also as a result of the war, the resettlement communities are being established near rural cities for reasons of safety and accessibility. This relocation will require agrarian reform in the areas around the resettlements. Once again, the land turned over to the peasant farmers is near cities and of high commercial value.
This policy has other benefits as well: because the land in Masaya was devoted to cotton production, the large producers used very strong pesticides to insure the health of their crops. The aerial application of these pesticides, however, took place over fields located right next to densely populated rural settlements. Now that land in Masaya will be planted in vegetables and basic grains, which do not require strong pesticides, a serious threat to the population’s health has been removed.
The rhythm of this transition toward production on small, individually owned plots of land, will depend on the development of the economic crisis. In any case, the challenge of the next stage is the incorporation of peasant production within the model of a mixed economy.
Revolutions always put strains on an economy. Revolutionary governments’ intentions to control those crises frequently carry with them unintended effects. Moreover, the inevitable counterrevolutionary movements only add to these problems. In the case of Nicaragua, the massive US aggression, waged in the name of democracy and the protection of the private sector in Nicaragua, is really a constant and conscious effort to exacerbate the economic problems. But this US government policy may also have an unintended effect. It may allow the Sandinista government to consolidate its support among the peasantry at the expense of both the state and the large rural entrepreneurs.
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