(3 of 5)
In an irate rebuttal, AID management declared that the inspector-general's report gave a "narrow, incomplete and in some cases inaccurate portrayal" of the program. The immediate aims of the reform, said AID, were to prevent El Salvador's political collapse and help avoid radicalization of the rural population. In those terms, said AID, "the reform has been an undisputed success." The State Department reported to Congress in January that land reform in El Salvador "has often seemed halting and painful," but "the overall record is one of significant progress." According to State, more than 10% of El Salvador's total population of 5 million, and perhaps 25% of the country's rural poor, have benefited from the program.
Typical of the achievements of the agrarian program is the Astoria Hacienda, a cooperative cotton and sugar plantation in the humid central department of La Paz, some 30 miles from San Salvador. Expropriated in 1980 as part of the Phase 1 land reform, Astoria is now run by 165 former sharecropper and tenant families, totaling about 840 people. They have the hired help of some 1,500 additional landless peasants who work during the five-month sugarcane harvest season. Prior to the takeover, recalls Segundo Flores, 33, president of the Astoria coop, "life was very hard. We did whatever the boss asked, no questions. Now we decide our own future."
Flores can point to some material improvement since the creation of the Astoria cooperative. As a tenant he earned the equivalent of $14.40 a week; now he takes home $20. But the plantation's new owners must pay off the capital debt resulting from purchase, an estimated $625,000. They have suffered from their lack of experience in managing an agricultural enterprise. Says Flores: "We are still learning. This is a huge business that will take time for us to operate just right."
The same spirit pervades the cooperative membership at the El Espino coffee plantation, a 2,400-acre spread on the outskirts of the Salvadoran capital. Says Jose Eduardo Gonzalez, 27, head of one of the 153 co-op families on the farm: "If suddenly you own the place where you only used to work, immediately your future is brighter." Gonzalez points to the existence of a clinic, a school and a market offering consumer credit on the plantation, facilities that were previously unknown. "We have much left to do," says Pablo Antonio Ramos, another co-op member. "But real progress will have to wait until the war is settled."
There is no such thing as progress for some 1,000 migrant workers who flock to El Espino during the harvest season. Their living quarters are crumbling hovels. Their naked children, potbellied with hunger, sit nearly motionless in the nearby shade. Many of the migrants are refugees from the guerrilla war who fled from land in other parts of the ravaged Salvadoran countryside. Nearly all of them echo the aspirations of Antonio Arevalo, 26, a landless sugar-cane worker at the Astoria Hacienda, who sighs, 'If there were some way I could join a cooperative, my ife would be much easier."