Word: landed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cultivated land is largely tied up in latifundios, the big farms that have dominated Latin American agriculture ever since the time of Conquistador Hernan Cortes, who got a royal grant of 100,000 Indians and 25,000 square miles of farmland in 1529. In Venezuela, 3% of the land holders own 90% of the land; in Chile, 2% own 52%; just 2% of the people own half of Brazil...
...system of land tenure that dominates Latin America," said a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study, "has not resulted in a satisfactory adjustment between population and land resources." Pressure has been growing against the latifundios ever since Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata raised his famous war cry of "land and liberty" in 1910. Many Latin American constitutions nowadays contain a fervent clause about the need for land reform. At a meeting of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America last week in Panama, the 21 hemisphere nations recommended agrarian reform "whenever appropriate...
...mere fact that land reform seems overdue has never guaranteed that it will work. Most attempts have been disastrous failures, chiefly because they were hastily executed and designed not as sound economic measures but attempts to destroy the latifundistas as a political class. ¶ Mexico's victorious rebels of 1910-17 burned down the stately haciendas, handed out land helter-skelter-and watched farm production sag. By 1940, when 64 million acres had been given to landless families, agricultural output stood 20% lower than in 1910. Reason: the new landowners were content to raise just enough to eat, committed...
...Communist-lining President Jacobo Arbenz (1951-54) of Guatemala gave out land to 180,000 peasants, mostly by the direct method of telling them to go take what they wanted. Result: subsistence farming and land wars-and, incidentally, the beginning of the plot that overthrew the regime...
...Bolivia, where 500,000 peasant families have taken over land since 1952, about 60% of the food is imported...