GRANT LAND REFORM IN ECUADOR
By Emmanuel Aguinaldo
The military junta of four "gorillas" [high-ranking officers] that has been governing the Republic of Ecuador for a little more than a year, celebrated its first anniversary in power by promulgating an Agrarian Reform Law. «~The president of the. junta, navy commander Ramén Castro Jijén, said that the principal aim of the law was "to block Communism and demagogy from access to the peasant sector," He stressed that the government will oppose "any violent.invasion of lands by, peasants, deceived or misinformed, or led by tendentious actions." (Emphasis added, ..
It is common knowledge that promulgation of the Agrarian Re-~ form Law, which is now being ballyhooed by the militarists,.is part of the Alliance for Progress that has been unfolding in our countries of Latin America -= with outstanding lack of success, it must be said -- for exactly three years,
This Agrarian Law, moreover, is nothing but another of the many hoaxes which the oligarchies of Latin America have been pulling on our peoples under pretext of containing the advance of the social revolution, It is a genuine miracle for the Ecuadorian landholders, Since it gives them the opportunity to own up to 3,500 hectares Lone hectare = 2,47 acres] on the coast and up tol, 000° in the mountains, In order to determine the present status of cand ownership, a census is scheduled, This will take, . . three years. Those latifundistas [big landholders] who offer plans for agricultural development within four years "will not be affected by the said law." In addition, "the bonds delivered to those whose land is expropriated are convertible, They can be redeemed through the acquisition of government properties and investments in farms or livestock approved by the Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization,"
Sooner or later this palliative imposed by the State Depart~ ment as a sop to the masses, had to-come to the small South American republic, The fact that they had to deal with militarists rather than some member of the oligarchy did not bother the sanctimonious authors of the Alliance for Progress, The "gorillas" have never given the slightest indication of responsiveness to the profound wishes of the dispossessed, They have traditionally proved to be the most loyal ‘servants of the oligarchs and the imperialists,
Consequently dictator Castro Jijén did not lie when he said. that the main objective in promulgating the Agrarian Law was to keep the Communists away from the peasant sector,
It could not be otherwise, The Alliance for Progress itself was born under the same slogan: to keep the Communists away from. all seotors of the national life, Not the Communists who follow the Kremlin line in every jot and tittle in accordance with its inter-
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national interests, but the genuine revolutionary Marxists, who, with the reviving air that came from the Caribbean, have been trying in ‘every possible way in all sectors of our continent to follow the Cuban example. In other words, the Alliance for Progress was created by Kennedy to contain Castroism, We doubt that it will succeed, The approaching revolution in Latin America cannot be contained by a hundred Alliances for Progress nor by the conversion of our countries into military barracks,
In addition, the Ecuadorian people have in neighboring Peru a terrifying example of an "agrarian reform" carried out by the Alliance for Progress in collaboration with the bourgeoisie, In Peru, the attempt to bring social and economic reforms into the countryside was transformed almost completely into a measure for colonizing eastern Peru (where the means of communication in this jungle area are so primitive that often to reach Iquitos, except by air, the whole continent must be circled to come up through the Amazon). The brutality of this "reform" is difficult to imagine, It involves trying to divide up inhospitable and unhealthy land among 5,000,000 Indians of the mountains who have lived from time immemorial in the areas where they were born, It is difficult for them to survive even the change in climate,
To think that the gentlemen landholders of the coast or moun tains are going to give up "their" properties simply because a law has been passed is to believe in myths,
It is true that our rulers are ready to offer some land, but this involves only the marginal areas. In Ecuador, with the same social and economic characteristics as Peru, with 2,000,000 Indians constituting approximately forty-five per cent of the population, the same pattern is projected: the indigenous peasant will reoeive nothing more than he already has ~~ his miserable huasipungo.*
Thus it was not by chance that peasant militia were organized in the Cuzco region despite the agrarian reform laws, or that comunalists have frequently invaded the lands of the gamonales [Landholders], or that the main peasant leader has been imprisoned for more than a year, Nor is it by chance that the major Ecuadorian "gorilla," quite aware of the rotten core in his proffered reforms and knowing what happened in Peru, categorically declares that they will not permit “any violent invasion of lands by peasants, deceived or misinformed, or led by tendentious actions,"
Castro Jijén knows very well that the promulgation of his
*Huasipungo: The landholder concedes to the Indian the temporary utilization of a small piece of land, a-half hectare or perhaps up to two hectares of poor quality, generally without irrigation. In ex~ change for this, the Indian has to work in the fields of the landholder four days of the week for a daily salary of $0.05 U.S.
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Agrarian Reform Law gives nothing to the desperate, land-hungry peasants, But he also knows that the reformist gestures of the Alliance for Progress, despite their merely palliative character, arouse growing expectations that can be dangerous to the status quo, Hence the military dictatorship is compelled on .the one hand to promise division of the land and, on the other, to warn that anyone trying it out will receive a bullet in the head,
What is happening in Peru and Ecuador must serve as an example to the other countries of the continent. It must help teach the dispossessed masses to realize that to gain ownership of the land on which they toil they have no recourse but to use the same methods employed by the "gorillas" against them, They can rely only on their own organized strength and their own initiative against the oligarchs and the militarists in their service,