Decree 900 (), also known as the Agrarian Reform Law, was a Guatemalan land-reform law passed on June 17, 1952, during the Guatemalan Revolution. The law was introduced by President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán and passed by the Guatemalan Congress. It redistributed unused land greater than in area to local peasants, compensating landowners with government bonds. Land from at most 1,700 estates was redistributed to about 500,000 individuals—one-sixth of the country's population. The goal of the legislation was to move Guatemala's economy from pseudo-feudalism into capitalism. Although in force for only eighteen months, the law had a major effect on the Guatemalan land-reform movement.Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), pp. 1, 20.
Indigenous groups, deprived of land since the Spanish conquest, were major beneficiaries of the decree. In addition to raising agricultural output by increasing the cultivation of land, the reform is credited with helping many Guatemalans find dignity and autonomy.Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz (1989), p. 470. "What an anthropologist wrote of Guatemala in the early 1930s still held true in the fifties: 'The land is for the Indian the symbol of his right to live, the connecting link between the material life with the divine existence.' For the first time since the Spanish conquest, the government returned land to the Indians. For the first time, also, the rural workers and small peasants participated in trade union activities, even though their role was confined to the local level."Gordon, "Case History of U. S. Subversion" (1971), p. 138. "The most striking feature of the Arévalo-Arbenz period was the organization and activity of the working class and peasantry, resulting in the development of new and powerful political groups—political parties, peasants' associations, agrarian committees for land allotment, labor unions, women's organizations." The expropriation of land led major landowners–including the United Fruit Company–to lobby the United States government to intervene by construing the Guatemalan government as communist. Decree 900 was thus a direct impetus for the 1954 coup d'état, which deposed Árbenz and instigated decades of civil war.
Background When Árbenz was elected in 1951, Guatemala had a high GDP but extremely unequal distribution of land: 2% of the population controlled 72% of the arable land. Only 12% of this land was under cultivation. Much of the population without land was poor, and had associated health problems.Douglas W. Trefzger, "Guatemala's 1952 Agrarian Reform Law: A Critical Reassessment ", International Social Science Review, 22 March 2002. Indigenous people had been treated as subordinate for hundreds of years, and had become increasingly impoverished and dependent on wages from plantation work. Indigenous people were also required to serve as migrant laborers through legal coercion, as Guatemala's coffee industry expanded rapidly from the 1870s through the 1930s.Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), pp. 8–9. "The 1879 Constitution excluded the indigenous population, the primary workforce in Guatemala, from citizenship (Reeves 159). Spanish and mestizo rights to land were restricted through the nationalization of land for the increased emphasis on coffee production."
After Juan Jose Arévalo won the 1944 election, Guatemala created a reformist constitution in 1945. This constitution explicitly stated that the government should protect communal land and create policies that would lead to equitable distribution of wealth. Article 88 of the 1945 Guatemalan Constitution, which served as the legal basis for Decree 900, stipulates: "It is a primary function of the State to develop agricultural activities and industry in general, toward the end that the fruits of labor shall preferentially benefit those who produce them and that the wealth shall reach the greatest number of inhabitants of the Republic." Article 90 recognizes the existence of private property, but suggests that rights to property could be waived in the social interest.Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), p. 9.Theo R. G. Van Banning, The Human Right to Property, Intersentia (2001), p. 141. This constitution marked the beginning of the Ten Years of Spring, also known as the Guatemalan Revolution: a period of democratization and liberal reforms.
Árbenz sought to transform Guatemala from a feudalist to a capitalist economy by distributing capital and creating infrastructure to increase production.McCleary, Dictating Democracy (1999), p. 10.Marcelo Bucheli and Ian Read, "Jacobo Arbenz (1913–1971)", United Fruit Historical Society, 2001–2006; accessed 19 November 2012.David McCreery, "'An Odious Feudalism' : Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in Guatemala, 1858–1920", Latin American Perspectives 13; accessed via Sage, . "The shift of the North Atlantic economy in the nineteenth century from a predominance of mercantile to industrial capitalism, far from undermining the productive system or inducing and diffusing with in Guatemala modern capitalist relations, had the effect of strengthening precapitalist forms of exploitation and extending these to previously unaffected areas of the country."Handy, "The Most Precious Fruit of the Revolution" (1988) pp. 683–684. The wish to transform Guatemala into a competitive capitalist nation led Árbenz to push for the construction of a national highway, a new port, a hydroelectric power plant—and for increased cultivation of unused lands.Gordon, "Case History of U. S. Subversion" (1971), p. 137. "Arbenz was determined to transform Guatemala into a modern capitalist state, to free it economically from dependence on world coffee prices and to wrest control of the economy from the US corporations dominating it. He launched four major projects to these ends: a highway to the Atlantic Coast to undercut the transport monopoly of the International Railways of Central America; an Atlantic port to compete with the one controlled by the Railway and the United Fruit Company; a national hydroelectric plant to lessen dependence on the Electric Bond and Share subsidiary; and an agrarian reform program which would greatly increase land and labor utilization and hence expand agricultural production, particularly of domestically-consumed foodstuffs."
Legislation Árbenz began promoting agrarian reform soon after becoming president. He was aided politically by a renewed Communist Party of Guatemala (PGT), which believed that some amount of capitalist development necessarily preceded a communist revolution. Árbenz accepted help from the PGT and its leaders were among his personal friends; however, he rejected some of their proposals, including a mandate for the organization of producer cooperatives.Handy, "The Most Precious Fruit of the Revolution" (1988) p. 682. "There were substantial differences, however, between Gutiérrez's suggestion and the law proposed by Arbenz, which came only after two weeks of discussion among his full cabinet, in which many moderates as well as radical activists were represented. Most important of the differences was that Gutiérrez's proposal had favored the organization of full producer cooperatives on the expropriated land. Arbenz's draft did not even mention the formation of cooperatives, while the law passed by congress allowed for, but did not stress, cooperatives."
The proposed law gained widespread support among peoples' organizations and in the national press, but was opposed by the Asociación General de Agricultores (AGA), which represented the existing landowners.Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz (1989), pp. 455–458.Handy, "The Most Precious Fruit of the Revolution" (1988) p. 682. "During the month that the proposed law was debated in congress, agrarian reform dominated the national dialogue. The revolutionary organizations, political parties, unions, and CNCG gave it their full support. Even the cautious and extremely influential newspaper El Imparcial gave agrarian reform limited support. The landowners' association attacked it vehemently, however."
Presented with a draft by the President, the Guatemalan Congress met on Saturdays and Sundays for five weeks.Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), p. 13. Congress introduced some changes to Árbenz's version, most notably restoring the idea of cooperatives (although not to the degree proposed by the PGT). Decree 900—Ley de Reforma Agraria—was passed on 17 June 1952 at 1:45 AM and signed into law by Árbenz on the same day. It called for of farmland to be redistributed to 100,000 families. Specifically, it authorized the redistribution of all uncultivated land on estates larger than , and of land on estates sized from , on which less than two-thirds of the land was cultivated. It also specified total redistribution of the government owned fincas nacionales, which contributed a quarter of the nation's coffee production.Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz (1989), pp. 459–460.
Article 1 of the law reads:
The Agrarian Reform of the October Revolution intends to eliminate the feudal property structure in the countryside and develop relations of production that originate to develop the land to the form of operational and capitalist methods of production in agriculture and to prepare the way for the industrialization of Guatemala.Translated by Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), p. 28.
Proponents of the law stated that it was intended to “eliminate all feudal type property...especially work-servitude and the remnant of slavery”.LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (1993), p. 118; citing Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), p. 224; Neale J. Pearson, "Guatemala: The Peasant Union Movement, 1944–1954," in Latin American Peasant Movements ed. Henry A. Landsberger (Ithaca, 1969), p. 224. Decree 900 specifically abolished slavery, unpaid labor, work as payment of rent, and relocation of indigenous workers.Translated by Harbour, Creating a New Guatemala (2008), p. 29.
Mechanisms The law did not redistribute land automatically. It created a National Agrarian Department (DAN), and required people without land to file requests with Local Agrarian Committees (CALs). CALs would then make decisions about how to reappropriate the land of major owners. Landowners could dispute these decisions, with an appeals process going all the way up to the President. The committees were formed from local groups, and intended to foster the spirit of community control and local political power. As suggested by the PGT, the law also gave new landowners the option of choosing lifetime tenure instead of private ownership, with the goal of preventing large landowners from simply buying back the land. The Fincas Nationales were available only through the lifetime tenure option.Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz (1989), pp. 460–461. "Moreover, through the Departmental Agrarian Committees and the Local Agrarian Committees, Decree 900 sought to stimulate the participation of the peasants and the labour organizations, rather than to impose the reform from the top alone. According to José Manuel Fortuny, a PGT leader who helped draft the legislation:
We [the PGT] proposed the creation of peasant committees [CALs] in order to lay the groundwork for the eventual radicalization of the peasantry. We talked to Arbenz about this, and he agreed with us. What we wanted was to foster the control of the reform from below. This would give the peasants a strong sense of their common needs. And if, from the system of lifetime tenure, cooperatives developed, the seeds of a more collective society would have been sown.Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz (1989), p. 461.