The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Gleijeses

The cry for land is, without any doubt, the loudest, the most dramatic and the most desperate sound in Guatemala.’ So wrote the Guatemalan bishops in 1988. In their country's long history, the bishops stated, only one president – Jacobo Arbenz – had addressed the issue of land reform.1 Inaugurated in 1951, Arbenz presided over the most successful agrarian reform in the history of Central America. The reports of the US embassy bear testimony to the fact that within eighteen months land was distributed to 100,000 peasant families, amid little violence and without adversely affecting production.2 Praise for initiating the reform does not belong, however, solely to Arbenz. As his wife observed, ‘Alone, he could not have done it’. Praise should also be given to the Communist party of Guatemala, whose leaders were Arbenz's closest personal and political friends.3

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Ryan M. Alexander

This article examines two episodes in the career of Bernardo M. de León, an agrarian reform leader and federal congressman from the state of Nayarit. During the first period, from 1920 to 1940, De León emerged as a local cacique responsible for both progressive politics and repressive maneuvers, particularly during the 1930s land reform effort undertaken by the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas. During the second period, from 1970 to 1990, he functioned largely as a political elder in Nayarit. In that capacity, he promoted the official history of the Revolution, at the same time that he manipulated collective memories of his own revolutionaryparticipation. In doing so, he helpedtodefine how successive generations of Mexicans remembered their Revolution and his role within it. Even after his death in 1991, the legacy of De León informed civic engagement in Nayarit, as various groups, ranging from ejido-seeking peasants to local political functionaries, invoked his memory in pursuit of their own political objectives.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Edward McInnis

This essay explores social and political values conveyed by nineteenth century world and universal history textbooks in relation to the antebellum era. These textbooks focused on the histories of ancient Greece and Rome rather than on histories of the United States. I argue that after 1830 these textbooks reinforced both the US land reform and the antislavery movement by creating favorable depictions of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus. Tiberius and Caius Gracchus (known as the “Gracchi”) were two Roman tribunes who sought to restore Rome's land laws, which granted public land to propertyless citizens despite opposition from other Roman aristocrats. The textbook authors' portrayal of the Gracchan reforms reflects a populist element in antebellum American education because these narratives suggest that there is a connection between social inequality and the decline of republicanism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Ridwan Ridwan

This article shows that Islam has laid the foundations of agrarian law reform or land reform, from the oppressive and exploitative pre-Islamic system of land ownership towards the fair, equitable and humanist-religious-based distribution of land ownership. The purpose of agrarian reform cannot be separated from the objectives of the law in general, that is to create justice, expediency and law certainty which describe the legal values either juridical, sociological or philosophical. To explain the idea of agrarian reform in Islamic law, there are some discussions proving the existence of the notion of land ownership reform in terms of the process of land right ownership and patterns of land distribution by the State based on the historical data, especially early history of Islam. Shifting paradigm from the feudalist pre-Islamic ownership system to the communalist-religious Islamic ownership system under the single authority of the head of state on the basis of the principle of fairness rests on the spirit to realize the ideals of public benefit.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Rizka Refliarny ◽  
Herawan Sauni ◽  
Hamdani Ma'akir

This study raises the issue of agrarian reform draft under the reign of President Joko Widodo. Agrarian reform became a priority program in the RPJMN of 2015-2019. Based on this matter, the writer analyzes the concept of agrarian reform during the reign of Joko Widodo terms of BAL. The nature of the study was a normative research with statute approach, which was done in four ways, namely descriptive, comparative, evaluative and argumentative. The results showed that the agrarian reform draft during the reign of Joko Widodo is a concept of land stewardship and land reform. The economic system leads to a form of capitalism. It is necessary to conduct refinement of content and material of BAL implementation in order to achieve the justice and the welfare of the nation and the State. The agrarian reform program should be carried out in stages in order to obtain the desired results. It requires the will, ability and active involvement of all elements of the state.


Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.


Author(s):  
A. James McAdams

This book is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. The book argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. It shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.


Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.


Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.


Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael

Chapter 7 describes the origins of the Chicago School and its successful projection into the hearts and minds of the global ruling class. Working chronologically, there is a description of how this program took root in Chicago and how some of its central figures, Friedman and Harberger, undertook a hemispheric campaign to capture both academic and government institutions. A history of the deregulation movement in the US and case studies of Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil highlight the breadth and depth of the campaign. The chapter closes in Europe where the neoliberal insurgency faced more-developed social states. Its success varied in Britain, France, and Germany.


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