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The subject of agrarian reform in El Salvador has an importance which extends beyond considerations of that country's immediate crisis. The agrarian problems in many parts of Latin America originate from similar sets of conditions, but nowhere have these conditions reached a more critical point than in El Salvador. Consequently the experience of agrarian reform there is likely to anticipate those problems of agrarian change which eventually will have to be faced by most Latin American countries.

Much nonsense has been written about the "agrarian reformer" myth. A retired American diplomat maintains that the agrarian reformer slogan was a clever artifice devised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mask its intentions and affiliations. Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has gone a step further. He contends that One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people's movement was not Communistic, but a social and "agrarian" reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organisations in the West.

The Agrarian Reform in Mexico has been capitalist in nature ever since its initiation. The difference in opinion between the radical and the conservative groups lies in which path should be taken for capitalist development, whether or not some precapitalist elements should be permitted to remain. It has become increasingly difficult to develop capitalism in its pure form because industrialists have acquired vested interests. The reason for the failure of the Agrarian Reform to liberate working farmers from poverty and desolation is to be found in the nature of the socio‐economic structure as a whole, not in the reform's inability to enhance productivity, nor any lack of measures to implement it.