Land reform faces a huge problem: too few acres to go around
"The government of El Salvador has been keeping its promises, like the land-reform program, which is making thousands of farm tenants farm owners."
—Ronald Reagan, in his April 1983 address to a joint session of Congress
"The agrarian reforms are a failure, and they are being made to fail by corruption and debt. Let the Reagan Administration say it's a success. They 're liars."
—Leonel Gómez, former adviser, Salvadoran land-reform agency, February 1984
Seen from the air, El Salvador is a stunning landscape of dormant volcanoes and twisting river gorges. That mountainous beauty, covering roughly three-quarters of the countryside, is also a national curse. With the highest population density in Central America (601 per sq. mi.), similar to that of India, El Salvador is a land that is ideal for guerrilla warfare but pitifully inadequate for the agricultural needs of its people. Salvadoran geography creates some harsh problems: Who owns the country's meager agricultural resources? How should they be put to use? These are among the most important issues in the country's civil war.
As José Napoleón Duarte prepares to assume the presidency of El Salvador, those land problems are once again under intense scrutiny, both at home and in Washington. At issue is the four-year-old U.S.-backed attempt to bring about social change in El Salvador and undercut support for Marxist-led insurgency among the country's 2.3 million rural inhabitants. The means: a sweeping land-reform program, akin to the one attempted by the U.S. in Viet Nam from 1970 to 1975, that aims at a radical transfer of scarce acreage from El Salvador's former feudal oligarchy to the majority of poor campesinos. The program, says a Western diplomat in San Salvador, is "essentially a socialistic program in a country fighting to defeat Marxist rebels."
Long under violent attack from both the extreme right and the extreme left in El Salvador, the attempt to redistribute land has followed a tortuous and sometimes bloody course and one that has cost two American lives.*Salvadoran conservatives have criticized the program for taking far too drastic an approach to the country's socioeconomic problems; the revolutionary left says that it is doing too little, too late. In the U.S., the program has provoked both skepticism and confusion over its aims and its ultimate usefulness in dealing with El Salvador's extremes of wealth and poverty.