Robert J. Alexander

When President Kennedy proposed a hemispheric Alliance for Progress to spur economic development and raise living standards in Latin America, he endorsed agrarian reform as a basic part of this effort. Land reform is not altogether new, of course, in Latin America. Simon Bolivar undertook, though with only limited success, to distribute estates seized from Spanish loyalists to the veterans of his revolutionary armies. In Haiti, when the republic was founded, the rebellious slaves killed most of their former masters who did not escape into exile, and the land was distributed among the Negroes. In the Dominican Republic, the Spanish colonial landowners fled before the Haitian armies which invaded the area in 1821, and from that time until the advent of the régime of the late Rafael Trujillo, most of the land remained in the hands of small peasant proprietors. Finally, from time to time during the nineteenth century there were sporadic efforts at land reform; in many Latin American nations, for instance, the church was deprived of its land, which was distributed in one way or another among the laity.