Word: peasant
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Beaten in general elections last June, Peru's worker-peasant APRA Party last week fell back on a familiar maneuver: a 24-hour general strike. The occasion proclaimed by leaders of APRA's 500,000-member Confederation of Labor was "indignation" over the dismissal of 300 workers at a Lima ceramics factory and police killings of two Indian peasant squatters in the backlands. Neither seemed quite enough to justify a nationwide strike, and few Peruvians were taken in. The strike was obviously intended to show President Fernando Belaunde Terry that APRA, though outvoted, was still too powerful...
...thesis of Biographer Prawdin that the Soviet academicians of the '20s were right about Nechaev: Lenin indeed owed as much to this peasant zealot as he did to the philosopher Marx. He convincingly argues that Stalin (who came closer than any other socialist to the ideal of absolute tyranny in the name of absolute freedom) was right in suppressing Nechaev on Nechaev's own principle that the truth should not be known except to the elite...
...Agrarian reform that will provide for land expropriation and technical, economic and social support to help peasant farmers produce more...
...reformer talking, and he will begin reciting the region's needs almost by rote: schools, houses, hospitals - and, always, land reform. As his example of land reform, he invariably points to Mexico, where land and liberty, tierra y libertad, was the war cry of Emiliano Zapata when his peasant army sacked the giant haciendas and occupied Mexico City in the bloody 1910 revolution. In those days, 835 rich families controlled 97% of the country's cultivated land. But not for long. In 1913, leading a band of armed riders, Revolutionary Major Lucio Blanco seized the 370-acre estate...
Planned Success. Since then, in theory, all a landless Mexican peasant has to do to get a farm is petition the government. If his claim is legitimate, he can then colonize unsettled government lands, join a communal farm called an ejido (pronounced eh-hee-doh), or move onto nearby expropriated plots. Land on any private farm that exceeds the government-set acreage ceiling, running from 250 acres to 1,500 acres, according to improvements, is subject to expropriation without compensation. Since the revolution, governments have parceled out some 125 million acres to 2,700,000 families and established...