Land for Those Who Work It? Or Land for Its Original Owners?

Six months after President Victor Paz Estenssoro –the leader of National Revolution in Bolivia– took power, a representative of Indian communities in the rural highlands of La Paz, the cacique Santos Cornejo, sent him a letter: “Mister President, now that you claim we are in a new era of defense of the rights of the majority, now that you claim to govern with social justice for all of the nation, we ask you to look out for the well being of the Indian race. We demand that you enact the agrarian reform, meaning a new land survey, so that the government orders all landholders to present the legal titles of their properties and if they don’t have them, the land may revert to the true owners.” (Letter from October 14, 1952, PR 765)

The letter of indigenous leader Santos Cornejo claimed Indians’ rights to land. However he was not following the established nationalist and Left principle embraced by the revolution: “land for those who work it.” Instead he proclaimed a distinct principle of “land for its original owners.” The cacique combined two political traditions, usually presented as mutually exclusive, into one connected political agenda. He claimed the right of the indigenous groups to be heard because they were part of the nation, but he asked for the recognition of their land rights as members of a specific corporate group, “the Indian race.” Previous scholarship focused on Bolivian National Revolution had assumed that the Revolutionary Government that openly proclaimed Indians’ integration and assimilation into the nation successfully eroded traditional indigenous systems of organization and authority. This paper examines how indigenous communal petitions forced the Revolutionary Nationalist Government to readjust its policies to include, at least partially, indigenous communities’ longstanding claims to land.