In early April 2021, shortly before the first round of the Peruvian general elections, the public television channel TV Perú pulled a programmed broadcast of the documentary La revolución y la tierra. A balanced account of the 1969 agrarian reform, featuring rich visual material and extensive interviews, La revolución y la tierra is the most watched documentary in Peruvian history. The director, Gonzalo Benavente, explained that the channel had decided to postpone the broadcast until after the election. Immediately, prominent ‘opinólogos’ weighed in to justify the decision—the documentary, they claimed, could unfairly influence the outcome of the election. In particular, they implied, it could bolster the campaign of Verónika Mendoza, a left-wing candidate who had polled well in the previous election in 2016, narrowly missing the second round, and who included in her manifesto a call for a second agrarian reform.
As this suggests, the 1969 agrarian reform remains very much at the heart of Peruvian politics. The unexpected victory, in the second round, of Pedro Castillo, a rural school teacher and campesino from Cajamarca who also promised a second agrarian reform and whose support came overwhelmingly from rural voters, confirms this. For this reason, Anna Cant's book could not be more timely.
Since the late 1960s, scholars have researched both the agrarian reforms and the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (RGAF) that enacted them. Political scientists and anthropologists in particular, working at macro and micro levels respectively, have provided in-depth studies of the agrarian reform's design and its impact on Peru's agricultural sector and peasantry, as well as on the country's political culture. These sharpened our understanding of what is arguably the key initiative of Juan Velasco Alvarado's ‘peculiar revolution.’ Cant builds on this scholarship but adds a historian's approach, examining the reform's importance as an ‘ideological project’ (2).
As any historian interested in the 1969 agrarian reform soon realizes, and as Cant discusses in her introduction, there is no centralized repository of sources available. In the early 1970s, Humberto Rodríguez Pastor and others brought together the documentation of the expropriated haciendas and created the Archivo del Fuero Agrario. Unfortunately, although this key material is located at Peru's National Archive, it remains largely inaccessible to researchers. Cant gets around this by drawing on a wide range of sources, from interviews to visual culture. In contrast to accounts that focus on either policy-making at the center or local impacts of the reform, Cant moves easily between the two levels, and her book foregrounds a regional analysis that compares and contrasts the experience of the agrarian reform in Piura, Cuzco, and Tacna.
Three central chapters explore this regional history of the reform from the perspective of political mobilization, education policy, and public discourse (or political communication). Cant's regional approach does several things: first, it shows that the reform was not applied uniformly across the country. Its implementation reflected not only prior land tenure conditions at the regional level, but also the specific political dynamics that shaped the implementation. Second, the tendency to view the Velasco regime as ‘revolution by decree,’ as Dirk Kruijt termed it, does not really align with the extensive evidence that Cant provides of the regime's attempts to elicit consent for the agrarian reform. The regime used SINAMOS (its political mobilization agency), education reform policies, and political communication strategies to overcome resistance to the reform from the peasantry and national and local elites. Finally, this approach underscores the agency of local actors, from individuals to collectives, in shaping the reception and ultimately the relative success of the reform in each region.
The final chapter explores the collective memory of the agrarian reform, building on the work of scholars like Enrique Mayer. Drawing on rich interview material and other sources, Cant shows how the highly polarized memories of the reform are repurposed and operationalized politically, as the postponement of La revolución y la tierra and debates around Castillo's electoral victory clearly demonstrate. In short, this book is an innovative and welcome study, as well as a timely one, of the 1969 agrarian reform that has much to teach us about the reform itself and its continuing importance to Peruvian politics and society.
