The unequal distribution of land in Colombia is the root cause of that nation’s violent history. Multiple policy initiatives spanning decades have failed to resolve the problem. The first agrarian reform law was promulgated in 1936, but it only motivated landowners to protect their assets by converting tenant farmers into contract labour. A backlash to […]
The sharecropping system that defined land tenure in the Ecuadorian highlands prior to agrarian reform was known as the ‘huasipungo’, a Quechua word that describes the relationship between landlords and tenant farmers. The end of this feudal system had a radically different outcome when compared to Peru and Bolivia, however, because landowners preempted the confiscation […]
The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which had been appropriated by families of European extraction or, more recently, allocated to timber companies as long-term forest concessions. The promise of recovering these lands […]
Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising against the feudal system that bound Indigenous communities to estates owned by wealthy families. The revolutionary government created the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) […]
The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is the most important agency regulating rural real estate markets. Administratively, the institution is charged with collecting and organizing the records of all rural properties in […]