Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1971

FAIN: FT-229803-15

Maria del Carmen Soliz
University of North Carolina, Charlotte (Charlotte, NC 28223-0001)

Summer research and writing on Latin American History and Rural Studies.

My project examines the second largest, though still understudied, case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America, and what was arguably the single most important policy to arise out of Bolivia's national revolution of 1952: agrarian reform. Previous studies drawn to study this radical re-definition of property relations have sought to gauge its legal and quantitative features. When they have brought a political lens to the Revolution's reforms, they have focused on decrees and congressional legislation. In contrast, my work situates politics at the center of the analysis by looking at the fraught encounter between landholders, Indians and peasants, and particularly the way in which central government policies were shaped, negotiated, and transformed at the local level. My findings reveal that the timing, depth, and final outcome of the land reform--a process ostensibly carried out by the revolutionary party--was fundamentally defined by local and community forces.

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