"Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005 proposes a new interpretation of the major indigenous risings in Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century and a new cultural theory of revolution itself. Based on 45 interviews with indigenous leaders conducted by the author from 2008 to 2011, the manuscript contends that these risings represent an emerging form of indigenous revolution that combines predominantly peaceful massive resistance and electoral democracy with revolutionary indigeneity. The manuscript builds toward a conclusion demonstrating how this form of revolution has implications far beyond the Andes"--
The causes as well as the consequences of land reform are revolutionary. Land reform is not really reform at all. In an agrarian society, land reform is a revolutionary act because it redistributes the major source of wealth, social standing, and political power. Successful large-scale land reforms in Latin America and elsewhere occur only during social revolution or through the actions of invading armies imposing revolution from above. The land reforms in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, and Nicaragua occurred during revolutions; the land reforms in Japan and Taiwan were imposed by invading armies. The reform in South Korea apparently represented a combination of the two. Fundamental land reform without social transformation is a logical and practical impossibility. This is the reason why land reform as a counterrevolutionary strategy, such as the ill-fated "land-to-the-tiller" program attempted in Vietnam, is bound to fail.
The existence of a division between what Italo López Vallecillos has termed the "agro-financial" and "agro-industrial-financial" factions of the Salvadoran elite has become what Enrique Baloyra calls "the consensus of scholarly opinion" on elite politics in El Salvador. As López Vallecillos describes the division, the agro-financial faction "opposes any attempt to transform the rigid framework of land concentration and low salaries in its devotion to the plantation economy that is the basis of its income and profits." The agro-industrial faction, in contrast, "tries to introduce changes in the economic system … and opts for less authoritarian political forms, within the framework of liberal democracy, representative but restricted and controlled." Oscillation between these two elite strategies has long characterized Salvadoran politics, and in the 1920s, the temporary dominance of the more liberal faction gave El Salvador the reputation of being the most progressive country in Central America. During times of crisis like the 1930s and the early 1980s, however, the positions of the two factions converged to support the retrograde policies of the more conservative "agro-financial" faction, which have given El Salvador an international reputation for ferocious authoritarianism.
Although the Department of State continues to attribute the war in Vietnam to "aggression from the North," there has always been a suspicion among more enlightened public officials and most academic critics of the war that economic discontent rooted in the inequitable tenure arrangements of the Vietnamese countryside might have some connection with the vigorous opposition of the Viet Cong to numerous Saigon governments. Thus it is surprising to learn that, on the contrary, support for the Saigon regime is most pronounced in provinces in which few peasants farm their own land, large estates were formerly owned by French or Vietnamese landlords, tenancy is widespread, and the distribution of land is unequal. This finding is particularly striking since it is contrary to data from the rest of Southeast Asia. In Burma, for example dacoity and other forms of social disorder were most frequent in the deltaic area of lower Burma, a region of extensive tenancy, unstable tenure, massive agricultural debt, and large-scale absentee ownership by Indian financial houses. In Thailand most social tension is concentrated in the northeast, a region of poor soil and shifting subsistence agriculture, and in the Menam delta immediately adjacent to Bangkok, where absentee holdings are farmed by tenants. Most commercial agricultural land in Thailand is cultivated by owner-proprietors and it is this fact that explains much of the country's political stability. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap movement was concentrated in central Luzon, again a region of extensive tenancy.
