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The chances of that happening are growing slimmer by the day. For one thing, some 40 cooperative farms created under the Phase 1 land reform have had to be abandoned because of the civil war. In La Paz department, for example, a Salvadoran land-reform official tells how peasant farmers were confronted by guerrillas who demanded a dramatic increase in wages for the migrant help. "We told them we could not do it," relates the official, "or else we would not have enough money to buy fertilizer and other supplies." The guerrillas then demanded and received money for their own support. When Salvadoran army officials learned of that arrangement, they angrily ordered the co-op to form a civilian-defense unit. Finally, the insurgents drove the co-op owners away.
The agrarian reform is also approaching its practicable limit. Under Phases 1 and 3, about 750,000 acres have been freed so far for redistribution. Phase 2 should provide only 20,000 to 70,000 acres. Yet despite the many criticisms of the reform, it is something of an achievement that a major redistribution, totaling about 23% of El Salvador's arable land, has taken place at all during the turbulent conditions of the insurgency. The transfer has in fact added to the violence. Says Marion R. Brown, director of the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "With land reform there are always winners and losers, and the losers generally put up a fight." Brown notes that in countries where postwar land reform proved to be a resounding success, such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the presence of U.S. forces played an important stabilizing role.
Even more essential for the success of land reforms in other countries was the existence of effective grass-roots organizations to push for the change. Says Brown: "If land reform is not done by those who will be the beneficiaries, then it won't perform well." Brown faults the Salvadoran government, U.S. advisers and campesino organizations for failing to take sufficient account of local conditions. The land-to-the-tiller program, for example, assumes that much of the country's soil will support continuous intensive fanning by small holders. Yet the opposite is true. Under the previous sharecropping system, the practice of renting out poorer lands on an annual basis meant that patterns of cultivation constantly shifted.
For all its faults, the Salvadoran land reform has undeniably improved life for hundreds of thousands of campesinos.
Just as clearly, even the most perfect land redistribution would not solve the battered country's rural plight: there simply is not enough land to go around. El Salvador's explosive population growth (currently about 2.6% annually) will continue to compound the problem. Says a Western official in El Salvador: "The agrarian reform has done a lot to take the heat out of the massive drift of campesinos to the violent left. But in the long term, El Salvador will have to come up with an economic alternative to agriculture." With civil war raging, alternatives of any kind in El Salvador are few and far between.
—By George Russell. Reported by Ricardo Chavira/San Salvador and Christopher Redman/Washington