The Old Donkey Cooperative and Peru’s 1969 Agrarian Reform

Peru’s 1969 agrarian reform holds an almost mythical status in national and regional history, widely accepted as Latin America’s most radical. It was, without a doubt, an extraordinary event. In less than ten years the government expropriated almost all the nation’s estates and transferred their lands to smallholders in the form of agricultural cooperatives. With the vast redistribution of land, long believed to be concentrated in the hands of a few latifundio, many hoped for an upending of rural inequality and underdevelopment. By documenting an historic expansion of the smallholding (peasant) population and a vast internal division of land, however, I show that estates directly held much less land than once assumed, leaving very little for redistribution and so limiting the transformative potential of the agrarian reform. To tell that tale, I turn to the valley of Antapampa, home to some of Peru’s oldest estates and, at least on paper, among the regions with the largest concentration of land. If a radical transformation was to occur anywhere, it was here. And yet it did not. In short, Antapampa shows us that we should see the agrarian reform as a symptom, rather than a cause, of a much more profound change: of a countryside filling with more smallholders than ever before and the limits of land transfers as a driver of rural development in the twentieth century.